Word: concertos
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...most part, today's composers ignore the concerto. Some believe that it is an anachronism, a throwback to the 19th century, when the individual performer counted most. Others say that it is too expensive to rehearse 100 or so musicians and hire a top-name soloist to perform a new concerto. Both arguments have some justification. Still, audiences love the familiar old concertos as much as ever. And so do pianists, as these releases make clear...
ALEXIS WEISSENBERG: RACHMANINOFF PI ANO CONCERTO NO. 3 IN D MINOR (RCA Victor); CHOPIN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN E MINOR, PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 IN F MINOR, and SMALLER WORKS FOR PIANO AND ORCHESTRA (Angel, 3 LPs). After returning to the U.S. last year from a decade-long self-imposed exile, Weissenberg, now 39, changed his first name from Sigi to Alexis. He obviously had some new musical ideas on his mind too. In the Rachmaninoff, the Bulgarian-born pianist displays a Horowitz-like technique, a poet's heart and vast reserves of power; he throws up wave...
...most recent major work of Russia's foremost composer, Dmitry Shostakovich, is the Violin Concerto No. 2 (1967). Soviet Virtuoso David Oistrakh has already performed it in a few cities in the U.S. and Europe, but most Westerners have not heard...
Last week the first recording of the concerto was issued on the Melodyia Angel label. The music should prove as much of a surprise to Shostakovich's fans as to his critics. Gone are the characteristic hard-edged rhythms, brittle orchestral sounds and prankish grotesqueries. Instead, the bad boy of Russian music seems to have found a new mood of lyrical quiet and contentment. His artistic debt to Sergei Prokofiev is as clear as ever-embarrassingly so at times-and some of his melodic writing in the first movement is downright dull. But the elegiac sweep of the middle...
...next night, Maag was back again in Philharmonic Hall repeating his triumph with a program that included Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26, but was climaxed by Haydn's "Drumroll" Symphony. Key of E-flat...