Pablo Casals speaking of the Schumann Cello Concerto: It is one of the finest works one can hear – from beginning to end the music is sublime. This, the first of the great romantic cello concertos, gives us a chance to compare the playing/interpretive skills of an older generation of cellists (Gendron, Piatigorsky, Fournier, etc.) – […]
Category Archives: Concerto
It would be very unfair to compare the Schumanns’ piano concertos (both in the same key, a minor) with one another. One (Clara’s) is the – albeit brilliant – work of a teenager, while the other is the product of a 35-year-old, mature composer at the height of his powers. What is indisputable, however, is that Clara’s […]
Any listing of Mendelssohn’s most popular works, would have his violin concerto somewhere near the top. His rethinking of the concerto form – started with his two piano concertos – here reaches its apogee; and the success of this remodelling can be measured by the plethora of famous near-imitations that followed it — the violin […]
The last composer in our brief survey of Polish music is Witold Lutosławski. Lutosławski’s style changed considerably during the course of his career, moving from Bartokian folk-based pieces (for instance, the Concerto for Orchestra) through to the ‘limited aleatoricism’ of Jeux vénitiens [Venetian Games] and later works. And yet there is an indefinable something in all […]
No, not a firm of solicitors from Warsaw, but two of Poland’s finest twentieth century composers. While their musical vocabulary is definitely of their time, they – unlike Penderecki or Lutosławski – weren’t deeply interested in exploring the sound worlds of sonorism, aleatoricism, serialism, etc. Grażyna Bacewicz was both virtuoso violinist and a composer, many of her […]
Ever heard a concerto that started like this before? [Go on, listen to it all: it’s worth it!] w May Night [Noc majowa] is the title of the poem by symbolist Tadeusz Miciński that was a source of inspiration for Szymanowski’s first violin concerto. The fantastical imagery of the poem –Miciński’s work was a precursor of […]
To finish, a look at (and a listen to, of course) some of Scandinavia’s exports: three second generation American composers whose parents hailed from Norway, Sweden, Finland or Denmark. And then maybe – just maybe, you understand – we’ll let the Yuletide Spirit take over and hear where it leads us… Any copyrighted material on these pages […]
