Word: pianos
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Glass learned to play the piano by listening to his older brother and sister taking their lessons and imitating them. The son of a Baltimore record store owner, he began studying the flute at the age of eight at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Precocious academically as well as musically, Glass entered the University of Chicago at 15 and graduated with a degree in mathematics and philosophy. He studied music too, working his way through the Beethoven quartets and teaching himself the twelve-tone system...
...STUFF. My father made everyone in our family take a musical instrument and go to lessons every day. I took piano lessons but I hated them. Finally, I convinced my father to let me take dance lessons at one of those schools where you get ballet, jazz, tap and baton twirling. Anyway, the dance school was really like a place for hyperactive young girls. I was pretty rambunctious...
Beethoven: The Five Piano Concertos; Six Bagatelles, Op. 126; Andante Favori; "Fur Elise." Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; London, 4 CDs. Despite its familiarity, the cycle of Beethoven concertos remains a severe test of mettle for pianists, as well as a handy yardstick for audiences with which to measure them. From the idiosyncratic classicism of the Second, which was the first in order of composition, to the incipient romanticism of the Emperor, the last, is a span of some 20 years but the musical journey of a lifetime...
...music's Mozartean wellspring in a clean, carefully articulated reading. The Third Concerto finds him in a more passionate, but still fundamentally classic, mood; the piece was, after all, written around 1800, while Beethoven's teacher Haydn was still alive. The revolutionary Fourth Concerto, in which the piano daringly speaks before the orchestra, gets an introspective, reflective performance in keeping with its contemplative nature. Only in the Fifth Concerto does Ashkenazy's rectitude inhibit him from the kind of large-scale reading the Emperor can support, yet his nimble style is fully in keeping with his restrained approach...
...Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 13 in C Major, K. 415, and 15 in B-Flat Major, K. 450. Malcolm Bilson, fortepiano, with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists; Archiv. Having started with the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the original-instruments movement has now worked its way through the baroque to classicism and early romanticism in an effort to discover what the music of these eras sounded like to the people of the time. Bilson is a leading exponent of the fortepiano, the gentler forerunner of the modern piano; together with Conductor Gardiner, he makes...