Word: concertos
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...film scores, including Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, the three Indiana Jones films, E.T., Superman, the Star Wars trilogy and, most recently, Rosewood. For these and others, Williams has accrued five Oscars, one British Academy Award and 16 Grammys. He has also composed many concert pieces, including several concertos, most recently a trumpet concerto commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra. Boston audiences are most familiar with Williams as the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Named the 19th conductor of the Pops in 1980, he retired in 1993. He remains the Conductor Laureate of the Orchestra and is Artist-in-Residence...
...performance produced ample evidence of the artistry behind the fame and of their notoriety in classical music circles. The concert consisted of three wood-wind concertos, a Flute Concerto in G by Johann Joachim Quantz, a concerto for bassoon and orchestra called The Five Sacred Trees by Williams and the Pied Piper Fantasy by John Corigliano. A small highlighted paragraph in the program booklet introduced this program as an experiment in concerto styles, setting forth the traditional three-movement Quantz concerto as a "control" for the more contemporary programmatic styles of the last two concertos. Even in this small paragraph...
Despite the tension surrounding the program, the performances were superb. Galway performed the Quantz concerto with a reduced orchestra. He directed the first few bars of the piece, then took up the solo theme. His was a crystalline sound, rich in the lower registers and piercing in the higher range. He attacked the beginning of each phrase and sustained his brilliant sound through each seemingly impossible passage. His playing seemed to be in a different realm from the other musicians. It was difficult to associate the beautiful bubbling sound the produced with notes on a page. The orchestra...
...next piece was Williams' bassoon concerto, The Five Sacred Trees. According to Williams' program notes on his piece, it was inspired by the writings of poet Robert Graves about the prayers that ancient Celtic tribes incanted before felling a tree. While each tree had its own prayer, Williams invokes five: the great oak, Tortan, yew, ash and the Dathi tree. The work was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for bassoonist Judith LeClair. In this week-end's performance, the solo bassoon part was played by the BSO's principal bassoonist Richard Svoboda, who has been with the orchestra since...
...thank her lucky stars. Her husband, the mentally skewed Australian pianist David Helfgott, whose story is told in the affecting movie Shine, has sold out his 11-city North American tour; Shine has received seven Oscar nominations; chaotic though it is, Helfgott's recording of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto (the "Rach 3" of the movie) is a hot seller, and Love You to Bits and Pieces, Gillian's fuzzy-warm book about how she rescued this lost soul and lofted him to stardom, has 185,000 copies in print. "It's almost as if we've gone into orbit...