Word: concertos
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RECORDINGS Elvira, Meet Wolfgang It is impossible to predict where a composer's next record hit will come from, even if the composer is Mozart. A case in point is Deutsche Grammophon's 1965 release of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, played by Hungarian-born Pianist Geza Anda. In three years it had sold a mere 2,000 copies in the U.S. Then a passage from the recording turned up as a recurrent, haunting theme on the sound track of the Swedish film Elvira Madigan, which opened in New York City last October. Deutsche Grammophon slapped...
JACQUELINE DU PRÉ: HAYDN'S CELLO CONCERTO IN C and BOCCHERINI'S CELLO CONCERTO IN B FLAT (Angel). Israeli Daniel Barenboim has earned a reputation as a first-rank pianist, and his British wife Jacqueline du Pre has won an equally enthusiastic following for her accomplishments with the cello. Neither is shy about displaying virtuosity, and this disk demonstrates that Mr. Barenboim is master of his house even on the concert stage, for he conducts his wife and the English Chamber Orchestra into the crystal world of Haydn and Boccherini with great aplomb. Jacqueline is so absorbed...
...Russian music, especially the orchestrations ("A harp in an orchestra is like a hair in the soup"). Yet his sonorous, spontaneous-sounding scores so deftly exploit the personality of individual instruments that they speak like characters in a drama-in fact, they often battle each other. His Clarinet Concerto, for example, is built around an argument between the clarinet and snare drum, with the orchestra kibitzing...
...says, "and I have many buttons." Curiously, the buttons do tend to resemble one another in all but size. The 48-minute Symphony, inspired by wartime patriotism, swoops from brassy fanfare to keening funeral march with a sure theatrical sense that never quite obscures its melodic poverty; the Concerto-Rhapsody covers much the same ground in about half the time, and was partially redeemed at the Washington performance by the dazzling virtuosity and superlative mugging of Soviet Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich...
...formless (although he was denounced in 1948 for his "bourgeois formalism") Khachaturian's large-scale compositions move ahead through a heady emotionalism, some of it inspired by the wailing, chantlike folk music of his native Armenia. The 20 years that separate the Symphony No. 2 from the Concerto-Rhapsody have seen some broadening of Soviet musical culture-the works of Bartok, Stravinsky and even Boulez have breached the curtain-but Khachaturian's style has deepened little...