The Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 has been called Mozart’s swan song. His last completed work, it was first performed on October 16, 1791 in Prague, less than two months before the composer’s death at the age of 35. At the time, the clarinet was a young instrument still in development, and a newcomer to the orchestra. When the 22-year-old Mozart visited Mannheim, a progressive musical center far ahead of provincial …
The music of Dmitri Shostakovich falls into two categories. There are the faceless proletarian marches, patriotic hymns, propagandistic film scores, and other superficial works which were written to appease Stalin and his cultural censors. Then, there is the music that Shostakovich dared not release publicly until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Much of this music ended up hidden in the composer’s “desk drawer.” The Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor was …
María Dueñas, the exceptional 20-year-old Spanish violinist, was our guest soloist at the Richmond Symphony last weekend. She performed Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. Dueñas was the first prize winner in the 2021 Menuhin Violin Competition, which was hosted in Richmond. In 2022, she signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. She performs on the 1736 “Muntz” Guarneri del Gesú violin. Paganini: Caprice No. 4 The fourth of Niccolò Paganini’s Twenty Four Caprices …
Beethoven was a newcomer to Vienna when, in 1795, he completed the Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major. It is bold music which was designed to showcase the young composer’s skills as one of the preeminent virtuoso pianists of the time. Although the C major Concerto was the first to be published (in 1801), its composition was preceded by the piece we now know as Piano Concerto No. 2. While the Second Concerto …
The legendary clarinetist Stanley Drucker passed away on December 19. He was 93. Born in Brooklyn, Drucker entered the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 15, but left after a year to accept a position with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. He went on to become principal clarinetist of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1948, Drucker joined the New York Philharmonic. His nearly five-decade-long tenure as principal clarinetist of the New York …
Béla Bartók was destitute and suffering from the terminal stages of leukemia when, in the winter of 1944, he was commissioned by William Primrose to write a Viola Concerto. Primrose, one of the twentieth century’s greatest violists, insisted that Bartók should not “feel in any way proscribed by the apparent technical limitations of the instrument.” Dividing his time between a summer cabin in Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondack region and a small …
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor opens with one of the most powerful and iconic introductions in music history. A mighty four-note descending line, stated three times in the horns, is punctuated by orchestral thunderbolts. A soaring and expansive theme emerges in the strings, accompanied by colossal ascending chords in the solo piano. Defying convention, this majestic and memorable theme opens the Concerto, yet never returns. Additionally, it sets up the wrong key—not …