Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...debonair and refreshingly free of pretension. Gordon, whose own Pick Up Co. uses dialogue as well as tapes and movement in performance, manages to shift smoothly into the more formal vocabulary of classical ballet. Field, Chair and Mountain is set to a noisy concerto by the 19th century Irish piano virtuoso John Field (thus the Field in the title). In commissioning the piece, Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov asked only that Gordon use a set, and Gordon came up with an inventive one. Executed with cheeky wit by Santo Loquasto, it unfolds from left to right like a Japanese screen: first...
...with intricate patterns of repetition. Between these two outbursts, the girl finds herself "enchanted" and "bewitched" by the woman she has stumbled across. Ursula DeVane, 44, lives in a stone house her ancestors put up two centuries earlier; she shares the place with her younger brother Julian, a melancholy piano teacher whom ^ Ursula is determined to force into fulfilling his early promise as a concert performer. To this end, she has sacrificed her own career as an actress and successive parcels of the family's properties...
Schubert: Piano Quintet in A Major, "Trout" (Emanuel Ax, piano, with members of the Guarneri Quartet and Julius Levine, double bass); Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Guarneri Quartet with Julius Levine; RCA). Schubert's ineffable "Trout" Quintet, so named for its use of the composer's song The Trout as the basis of the fourth movement, is one of the glories of the chamber-music repertory, beloved of pianists and string players (and audiences) everywhere for its grace, wit and warmth. Ax's sensitive, full- toned pianism and the Guarneri's rich ensemble are perfectly matched here, to each other...
...prose selections in a superior performance. In her closing number, evoking the Southern Baptist spirituals from which jazz sprung, Wiford-Foster was nothing less than inspirational in her preacher -like solo. In the band, Paul Brusiloff provides a hot trumpet, while Leon Greunbaum is fine on the piano. A Don Braden solo on the tenor saxophone, a la Stanley Turrentine, was very good once he warmed up and hit his groove...
Picker's Keys to the City, his second piano concerto, is a sometimes freewheeling portrait of the great bridge, most effective when brimming with the high spirits of Brooklynites George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. Unfortunately, though, the bonhomie is only intermittent. Despite delightful incongruities, like a six-note boogie-woogie that unexpectedly breaks out of some dense noodling, too often the piece is aimless and unfocused when it should be straightforwardly celebratory. At 30, Picker has compiled an impressive list of awards and commissions and has written other large-scale works, including a symphony and a violin concerto. What...