Word: concertos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During one five-week period last winter, the Philadelphia Orchestra offered the world premieres of challenging concertos by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Richard Wernick. In New York City in February, Elmar Oliveira gave the first performance of a lyrical new work by Hugh Aitken, while in Montreal, Stern contributed the North American premiere of French Composer Henri Dutilleux's impressionistic concerto. The same month Virtuoso Shlomo Mintz played Marc Neikrug's neoromantic concerto for the second time, having presented its world premiere in 1984. And this week Sergiu Luca will give the American premiere of William Bolcom's frisky new concerto...
...Bolcom's concerto is indeed that. The composer is probably better known as the peerless accompanist for his wife Mezzo Joan Morris in their programs of American popular songs. But his spacious cantata on Blake poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was in contention for 1985's Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto...
...that includes bongos, gongs, chimes, temple blocks, harp, amplified harpsichord and vibraphone but omits the orchestra's trumpet and violin sections. It is a felicitous concept, but, alas, the composer's rather dogged quality of invention is not up to his orchestration. Despite a sturdy reading from Carol, the concerto lacks the strong stylistic profile that might have made it memorable...
...20th century, says Stern, "is one of the richest periods in musical creativity." A discriminating advocate of contemporary violin music who has given premieres of concertos by William Schuman, George Rochberg and Krzysztof Penderecki, Stern has had a privileged view of modern musical history; in June he will premiere a work by Britain's iconoclastic Peter Maxwell Davies in Scotland. The phantasmagorical Dutilleux concerto was commissioned by Radio France in celebration of Stern's 60th birthday almost six years ago ("He had problems about coming to an end," says Stern, explaining the delay) and was first performed in Paris last...
...special talent for languages, mathematics and the piano, who would be an interesting lad even if his dad did not happen to be Soviet Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In Palm Beach, Fla., last week, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, 13, played in his most formal concert yet, performing Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto with the Soviet Emigre Orchestra. Only 18 months old when his father was exiled, the boy has thrived at his family's isolated home in Cavendish, Vt., where he began playing at age six and still practices between schoolwork for three hours a day. How does his father react...