Word: ogdon
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With such kinetic qualities, Ogdon could easily have gone on to a profitable life of barnstorming the world with war-horse concertos. Instead, after sharing first prize with Vladimir Ashkenazy in Moscow's 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition, he became an evangelist for music that few other major pianists would touch. One of his best LP albums is devoted entirely to some of the piano music of Carl Nielsen (RCA), another to Ferruccio Busoni's hour-long piano concerto (Angel), a woolly and wonderful specimen of Germanic post-romanticism that includes a resounding men's chorus in the finale...
...good reason is that Ogdon is something of an out-of-the-way composer himself. His output already includes 20 works for piano, a string quartet and a brass quintet. His major effort so far is the Piano Concerto No. 1, a three-movement, 25-minute work that he performed brilliantly late last year before an enthusiastic audience in London's Royal Festival Hall. At Christmastime he recorded it for E.M.I, with the Royal Philharmonic under Conductor Lawrence Foster; Angel will be issuing it in the U.S. next fall...
...concerto has the youthful fault of jumbling together too many influences, but reveals Ogdon as an impressively forceful and colorful composer who-like Ogdon the pianist-has a flair for handling big and complicated structures without losing what the pop world would call the big beat. His writing for the piano is flamboyant, excitingly splashy but tamed by good taste. The expertise of his orchestral writing is remarkable-bold blocks of brass sound, piquant wisps of woodwind, supple simplicity in the strings. Perhaps the most important thing about his composition is that he has dared to opt for tradition over...
Boneless Fadeaway. Ogdon and his pianist wife Brenda Lucas, together with their children Annabel, 9, and Richard, 5, live quietly in a town house on London's Regent's Park. There he seems the farthest thing in the world from what many consider him to be: a reincarnation of the flamboyant temperaments of bygone eras. His handshake is a boneless fadeaway. His response to a lengthy conversational thrust of a close friend is likely to range from a noncommittal "Mmmmmmm," to a rare "Very interesting." Brenda recalls that when she first met him at music school, he hardly...
...Ogdon's "shy bear" image helps camouflage an intense inner life, great dedication, intellect and sweeping ambition. Ogdon, in fact, is bidding hard to join a select though all but vanished company of virtuoso pianist-composers. At the close of the 19th and in the early 20th century, the musical type culminated in a series of men who combined powerful and poetic performing styles with highly idiosyncratic ways of writing for the piano-Rachmaninoff as well as Liszt, Busoni and Scriabin. Closer to the present time, the line seems to have ended with Prokofiev and Bart...