Month: September 2016

The Wild Harmonic Adventures of Liszt’s Concert Study No. 3, “Un Sospiro”

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On a technical level, Franz Liszt’s Concert Study No. 3 in D-flat Major, “Un Sospiro” is a skillfully delivered magic trick. Its score sprawls onto three musical staves and it sounds as if it requires, at minimum, three large and dexterous hands. But all of these voluptuous tones are played using an amazing slight of hand. The melody line alternates between the pianist’s left and right hands while the surrounding arpeggios remain smooth and …

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New Sibelius Release: Osmo Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra

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Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra released an exiting new album this past Friday. The recording, produced on the Swedish label BIS Records, features Jean Sibelius’ Third, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies. It concludes Vänskä’s celebrated, Grammy-Award-winning Sibelius cycle with the Minnesota Orchestra- a project launched in 2012 and temporarily halted by a fifteen-month-long management-imposed lockout. Recorded in June of 2015, this latest disk is a Super Audio CD with surround sound technology, which …

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Remembering the Twins, Fifteen Years Later

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Sunday marks the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. If you’re old enough to remember that day and the numbing weeks which followed, the details of your life at that time, both consequential and trivial, are probably seared into your memory. For me, the horrific events of 9/11 followed on the heels of my successful audition for the Richmond Symphony. On that warm, clear Tuesday morning, I had just …

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Three B’s for the First Day of School

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 The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion. To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them. Without discipline, there can be no freedom. Music was not invented by the composer, but found. -Nadia Boulanger It’s that time of year again. As students of all ages head back to school, let’s listen to education-related pieces by the three B’s…Brahms, Boulanger, and Barber. …

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Jason Vieaux: “Images of Metheny”

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Here is music which seems strangely appropriate for the unofficial end of summer. It’s an excerpt from classical guitarist Jason Vieaux’s 2005 album, Images of Metheny, which pays homage to the music of the Pat Metheny Group. Something interesting happens when Metheny’s glistening, electronic-based, Brazilian-tinged jazz fusion is transferred to the intimacy of the solo guitar. Letter from Home is the final track on the Pat Metheny Group’s 1989 album by the same name. This …

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Kurt Weill’s “September Song” and the Power of Harmony

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Even in the case of a popular song, harmony can be as important as melody. For example, listen to the harmonic surprise at the beginning of Richard Rodgers’ If I Loved You from Act 1 of the groundbreaking 1945 musical, Carousel. On the word, “loved,” a sudden, poignant diminished seventh chord takes us to a completely different world. This one melancholy chord tells us everything we need to know about what might lie ahead in the …

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