Word: violins
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Kodaly: Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8; Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7 (Jerry Grossman, cello; Daniel Phillips, violin; Nonesuch). Except for the Hary Janos Suite and perhaps the choral Psalmus Hungaricus, Zoltan Kodaly's music is not much heard today, only 16 years after his death. It is his contemporary, friend and colleague, Bela Bartok, who seems to have won the Hungarian seat in the 20th century pantheon of great composers. But Kodaly's music, while less frankly adventurous than Bartok's, is just as redolent of the Magyar spirit, and these two works display it well...
...front of Au Bon Pain, and thoughts of love return to dreamy eyed collegiates, a host of worried questions fill the Yard air--questions such as, How far will I have to walk to class next year? What is the neck index in that House? Are there really 300 violin-playing, Pac Man-addicted, biochem majors over there...
Gubaidulina's Offertorium (1979-80) uses the theme of Bach's Musical Offering as the takeoff point for a complex violin concerto that lasts about 35 minutes. Atonal passages mingle freely with tonal ones as the theme is atomized and then reconstructed in reverse; the modern orchestrational device of flutter-tonguing for flutes and brass is complemented by traditionally virtuosic writing for the solo violinist. Gubaidulina, 53, also evokes her Russian predecessors Stravinsky and Prokofiev, most strikingly in a passage of glissandi string harmonics that recalls The Firebird. By Western standards, Offertorium may be tame, but given the governmental restrictions...
...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 he needs to do now is fix more surely his own point of view...
...repertoire. His love of contemporary music is already clear in his Cleveland programming: on a U.S. tour last month, he offered a ravishing performance of Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished atonal oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder), and an impassioned reading of Alban Berg's twelve-tone Violin Concerto, with Soloist Itzhak Perlman. The most recent Severance Hall program featured the late-Romantic composer Hans Pfitzner's Violin Concerto, a work rarely heard outside Germany. Yet Dohnanyi is also strong in more traditional fare, which he leads with crisp economic gestures. A propulsive but disciplined reading...