Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...author gives equally detailed attention to Joplin's music -- the early parlor songs, the magnificent piano rags, the waltzes and marches and Treemonisha, his great last work. Berlin's analysis is always illuminating and expert; however, nonmusical readers may have trouble following his arguments, illustrated as they are by plentiful examples from scores. There are tantalizing references to such lost works as a symphony, a piano concerto and the opera A Guest of Honor, which was registered for copyright in 1903, although no copy of the score is known to exist...
Upshaw grew up in a suburb of Chicago. "Mom, who was a schoolteacher, played the piano," she says, "and Dad, who was a minister, played the guitar. I started singing with them and my older sister when I was five -- songs by Peter, Paul and Mary and other folk stuff." Their group was called the Upshaw Family Singers. Her youthful idols were Barbra Streisand, Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin, and she dreamed of a career in musical theater. At Illinois Wesleyan University, though, she studied voice with her future father-in-law, David Nott, and he introduced her to classical...
...voice is light and agile -- it couldn't fill up a concert hall, but she never overtaxes herself and instead achieves an understated, coffee-bar intimacy. She wrote or co-wrote almost all the album's music. She is accompanied by the soft, unhurried, breezy sounds of a piano, acoustic guitars and strings...
...London disc also features a recording of Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1, with Ronald Brautigam at the piano and Peter Masseurs supplying the trumpet solo work. The piece resembles Shostakovich's other concertos for violin and cello in that conventional devices of the Germanic school are used for delirious swells and placid falls, with the addition of unexpected minor chord modulations that open up new possibilities for the instrument. Those who see Shostakovich as a throwback to the Romantics should not underestimate the importance of his original variations on timetested themes...
Brautigam offers sharp, pointed playing reminiscent of John Browning. Superior recording circumstances have allowed his cutting solo lines to ring with intensity. Chailly and the Concertgebouw supply restrained accompaniment that seems too intimate at times. The Piano Concerto, after all, does offer many more serious ideas than the Jazz Suites...