Word: concertos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Carnegie Hall last week, Muti offered a program that exemplified the merits of such an approach. Three obscure vignettes written around the turn of the century by Italian Composer Giuseppe Martucci, chips off the old Puccinian block, got glowing, almost impressionistic ; readings. By contrast, Richard Wernick's new Violin Concerto had a hard, steely edge. Although the work proved to be much strenuous ado about nothing, it was energetically performed by the Philadelphians and Soloist Gregory Fulkerson. Finally, Dvorak's undeservedly neglected Fifth Symphony received a taut performance that, among other virtues, was notable for the breathtaking precision...
...fresh material keeps coming. Two years ago, Peter Martins drew on her restraint and musicianship in a delicate work, Rossini Quartets. Last week at the New York City Ballet, Jerome Robbins weighed in with a really fat part. In Memory of . . . , set to Alban Berg's elegiac Violin Concerto, is a highly dramatic work, more openly emotional than Robbins usually allows himself to be. In the role of a dying girl, Farrell adds another heroine to her gallery of lost ladies...
Berg wrote his concerto in 1935 after the death of Manon Gropius, the beloved daughter of his friend Alma Mahler and the architect Walter Gropius. The girl died at 19 of polio and the composer dedicated the work "to the memory of an angel." Robbins' scenario begins quietly and a bit flatly as Farrell moves with increasing stiffness and bafflement between her lover (tenderly danced by Joseph Duell) and friends. Suddenly they move off and she is left with a gauntly beautiful angel of death (Adam Luders). Their pas de deux is the heart of the ballet. The moves...
...other two works on the album also evoke Poe's haunted world. Conte Fantastique, a piquant harp concerto by Debussy's acolyte Andre Caplet, is based on the short story The Masque of the Red Death, and Schmitt's orchestral tone poem draws its inspiration from the poem "The Haunted Palace." Pretre gives each work a suitably atmospheric reading, emphasizing Debussy's gloom, Caplet's lightness and Schmitt's vigor...
Ashkenazy takes an elegant approach to the cycle, caressing the music with an exquisite tone and spinning it out with an effortless technique that lets the music speak unimpeded. In the robust First Concerto and the rippling Second, Ashkenazy pays homage to the music's Mozartean wellspring in a clean, carefully articulated reading. The Third Concerto finds him in a more passionate, but still fundamentally classic, mood; the piece was, after all, written around 1800, while Beethoven's teacher Haydn was still alive. The revolutionary Fourth Concerto, in which the piano daringly speaks before the orchestra, gets an introspective, reflective...