Word: concertos
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...regardless of the quality of the performance, lays bare with an unconscious genius the morphology of the musical art. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra's concert of last Friday evening did just that. The program of Webern's Six Pieces, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Bartok's Violin Concerto was not just another variation of the workhorse-standard esoterica-classic modernist admixture. It penetrated the analytic encrustation of ten thousand musicologists, from the turbid intellectualism of Boulez to the ornithological rhapsodizing of Messeian to the volcanic dogmatism of Stockhausen, to reach the foundation of twentieth-century music...
...Violin Concerto was the culmination of this search to reconcile modality and tonality, impressionism and germanic form. His Violin Concerto displays three of his leading characteristics: efflorescent harmonic textures, generative rhythms, and his own cyclical sonata-allegro form. The Concerto requires superb understanding of its organic interrelations as well as the ability to switch from intense but strictly controlled lyricism to propulsive technics...
...energico and tempo rubato. This was especially noticeable in the last movement, which as a result sounded perfunctory and rather episodic. The orchestra's strings and winds usually produced an opaque sound lacking inner luster, but the brass sonorously performed those resplendent tutti passages which hint of the later Concerto for Orchestra...
RUDOLF SERKIN: BRAHMS PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN D MINOR (Columbia). Obviously Serkin likes this noble battle plan for piano and orchestra. Previously, he recorded it with Fritz Reiner, George Szell, and with Eugene Ormandy. Now he's back again with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. Few other scores so perfectly show off Serkin's heroic style, his armor-plated technique, and his by now infallible sense of just when to charge Brahms' craggy, imperial peaks...
WALTER GIESEKING: BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5 IN E FLAT (Seraphim). This is the second low-priced issue of a Gieseking Emperor; the first (on Odyssey) is older and not as up-to-date in sound. For a seasoned campaigner, the late German pianist could be surprisingly youthful when he turned to Beethoven. Here he treats the Emperor more like a prince-in-waiting than an absolute monarch; he never stoops to imperious rhetoric, his tone is lithe and silvery, and he moves with quickness and grace. It is not the only way to treat the music...