Compared to their more populous cousins for piano or violin, cello concertos are relatively thin on the ground. There are, for example, no cello concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Brahms or Tchaikovsky. But what the cello repertoire lack in quantity it certainly make up for in quality: think of the Haydn (two of them […]
No-one can resist the ravages of time and, as you can tell, the difference between ages 22 and 65 was, in the case of Alexander Glazunov, of some significance. (The pose is interesting: is it an habitual stance or is the older man consciously imitating the famous Ilya Repin portrait of him that you see […]
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.) – […]
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 […]
