Piano Concerto
Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony Play Mahler’s Sixth; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto
In a way it is pointless to try to write words on music like this, but here goes anyway. It doesn't really help to read glib selective quotations from even the composer describing the music, sometimes in a single word, "tragic," "fate," "Heldenmord" fail to do justice while missweighing one idea, like a greedy fruit grocer. The Mahlers deep and checkered feelings about his Sixth Symphony are clearer from this quotation from Alma Mahler's memoirs, even if it does sound ambiguous or contradictory at one level:
Mozart and Britten by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
I have heard it lamented "O, if only Mozart had written 25 violin concertos in the 1780's and only 5 piano concertos." Notwithstanding the alternate universe where Mozart lived to 89 and wrote many of each, the D major concerto for piano and violin, as Philip Wilby reconstructed it in 1985, goes some way to consoling the lamenting violinist. Mozart began composing the fragment (which W. J. Turner in his 20th century biography, disappointed not to have more of it, called a "remarkably fine work") sometime during his month-long stay in Mannheim in 1778 on the way back to Salzburg from Paris. Whereas Mozart wrote the 5 violin concertos for himself to play, this concerto he intended for another violinist, Ignatz Franzl, probably intending to perform the piano part himself; he wrote to his father just before leaving Paris that he wanted to give up playing the violin. This was at a weighty juncture, or at least a phase change, in Mozart's life often implicitly or explicitly considered the fulcrum between "early Mozart" and "late Mozart." Indeed the double concerto shows some of the Mozartish profundity and ecstasy of the later piano concertos while still having much of the humor, play and levity of the young Mozart.
Gergiev with the LSO in Prokofiev Symphonies and Concertos at Avery Fisher Hall
Lincoln Center Great Performers Presents
Russian Dreams: The Music of Sergei Prokofiev
Monday, March 23, 2009 at 8:00
Avery Fisher Hall (Broadway at 65th Street)
London Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, conductor
Vladimir Feltsman, piano
All-Prokofiev program
Symphony No. 1 in …