Word: concertos
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Ragtime & Skooby-Ooby-Doo. One of the evenings came alive to the sound of jazz, of a sort. Aaron Copland (63) performed his 37-year-old Piano Concerto; it showed, among other things, where Gershwin got some of his later inspiration. The music that earned Copland cries of "Ogre!" when he first played it with the Boston Symphony in 1927, seemed slightly comic today, a parÓdy of all the ragtime and razzmatazz that were its musical contemporaries...
Kirchner's Concerto, commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Baltimore and completed in 1960, is a vast rhapsody. Like a long cadenza, it exploits constant shifts of timbre, pace, and loudness. A recognizable motif stated at the beginning of the first of the two movements is repeated later by the French horn; aside from that recurrence, little apparent form but great passion animates the work...
...Concerto seems to savor each instant, in a continued series of "Now! Now! Now!" At times, striking combinations of timbres stand out: for example, the violin, the large gong, and an open, bottom C on the cello; or again the celeste, Violin, and the clarinet. At other times, the solo violin and cello luxuriate in close and shifting harmonies. Elsewhere, Kirchner indulges in bombastic percussion: a fast run in the clarinet or strings leads to a bang...
Unlike the only extant recording of the Concerto (also conducted by Kirchner), this performance did not obliterate practically everything but the solo violin and cello. Joseph Silverstein, violin, and Madeline Foley, cello, and the other instrumentalists, members of the Boston Symphony, sounded clearly and, thanks to Kirchner's careful direction, at the right times...
...addition to conducting his own Concerto and Les Noces, Kirchner performed with Luise Vosgerchian two Schubert compositions as entr'actes. Performed completely satisfactorily, these two works for four hands at the piano did serve usefully as comic relief. More familiar and predictable they could not have been...