Posts Tagged ‘piano concerto’
“My theory. Music can fix anything. Anything.”*…
A rich collection of interactive music theory tools & visual references to learn music online for free…
I’m creating this site to anchor what I’m learning and as a way to bring creative and interesting ways to present music theory topics. I’m hoping the content on this site will prove helpful in your own music-making journey!…
Learn music theory: “Muted.io,” from @muted_io. You might want to start with the Cheat Sheet“…
* Asa Butterfield
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As we play (with) scales, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto (Op. 38) premiered as part of the opening festivities for Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center in New York, with John Browning as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.
The first two movements were completed before the end of 1960 but the last movement was not completed until 15 days before the world premiere performance. According to Browning (in the liner notes for his 1991 RCA Victor recording of the Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony), the initial version of the piano part of the third movement was unplayable at performance tempo; Barber resisted reworking the piano part until Vladimir Horowitz reviewed it and also deemed it unplayable at full tempo. In the end, the work was met with great critical acclaim; it earned Barber his second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 and the Music Critics Circle Award in 1964.
“Turn the page”*…
Like elevators, page turners are only remarkable when things go awry. And go awry they do…
But then…
There are breakout moments in musical history where turners become visible and audible through neither accident nor error. In Ravel’s two-piano version of his Introduction and Allegro, he calls for a mysterious “third hand ad lib.” to perform an impossible trill—a part that could only be executed by an especially daring page turner, reaching across the keyboard and right into the middle of the action. In the middle movement of Charles Ives’s Violin Sonata No.2, a raucous hoe-down, the composer’s manuscript features an additional stave with a drum-like rhythm instructing the page turner to smash out noisy cluster chords at the bottom end of the keyboard. It’s a strong reaction to anonymity…
Why pager turners matter (with an number of very amusing examples): “Turning Over.”
* Metallica (from the 1988 album “Garage, Inc.”)
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As we keep time, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that Alexander Scriabin’s piano concerto premiered in Odessa, with Scriabin as soloist. Already a renowned pianist, the then-24-year-old Scriabin was making his debut as a composer for the orchestra (with what turned out to be his only concerto). While this early work was influenced by Chopin, Scriabin went on to develop (independently of Schoenberg) an atonal musical system, and was one of the most innovative– and most controversial– of early modern composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that “no composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater love bestowed.”
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