Word: violins
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...twin obstacles in the path of contemporary music are the past and the recent past. In the violin repertoire, the beloved romantic concertos have maintained such an iron grip on audience affections that even indisputable 20th century masterworks have been neglected in favor of the millionth performance of the Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky concertos. It has not helped that some compositions of the '50s and '60s amounted to teeth-grinding assaults on the instrument that made both soloists and audiences recoil...
...times are changing, and not a moment too soon. "The violin is being looked at again as a great singing instrument," says Virtuoso Isaac Stern, 65. "It is no longer being beaten, plucked, forced and squeezed." Perhaps as a result, the American orchestral scene has lately been a festival of new violin concertos...
...Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto, a haunting, elegaic slow movement inspired by a mournful tune Bolcom heard whistled on the New York City subway and a riotous finale that is an homage to the late jazz fiddler Joe Venuti. Bright and accessible, the concerto is steeped in a popular idiom. "You don't have...
...work is a free-tonal fantasy for the solo instrument, which is set off against an ensemble that includes bongos, gongs, chimes, temple blocks, harp, amplified harpsichord and vibraphone but omits the orchestra's trumpet and violin sections. It is a felicitous concept, but, alas, the composer's rather dogged quality of invention is not up to his orchestration. Despite a sturdy reading from Carol, the concerto lacks the strong stylistic profile that might have made it memorable...
...20th century, says Stern, "is one of the richest periods in musical creativity." A discriminating advocate of contemporary violin music who has given premieres of concertos by William Schuman, George Rochberg and Krzysztof Penderecki, Stern has had a privileged view of modern musical history; in June he will premiere a work by Britain's iconoclastic Peter Maxwell Davies in Scotland. The phantasmagorical Dutilleux concerto was commissioned by Radio France in celebration of Stern's 60th birthday almost six years ago ("He had problems about coming to an end," says Stern, explaining the delay) and was first performed in Paris last...