A fun, little Spotify playlist of concertos you don’t run across too often. –TM
Rodion Shchedrin: ‘Naughty Limericks’
The Concerto for Orchestra No. 1, “Naughty Limericks,” by the brilliant Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin (born 1932), composed in 1963. Great fun. Evgeni Svetlanov conducts the USSR Symphony Orchestra.
Weissenberg plays ‘Petrushka’
Here’s one of my favorite concert videos. It features pianist Alexis Weissenberg playing Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka. The director is Ake Falck, and while he didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, the lighting and the camerawork here are superb. Notice
Lukas Foss: Piano Concerto No. 1
The neoclassical Piano Concerto No. 1 by Lukas Foss (1922-2009), recorded by Pacific Symphony, Carl St.Clair, conductor and Jon Nakamatsu, piano. Released 2001. The piece was first written as a clarinet concerto when Foss was 17. He made this version
Bernstein@100: Nielsen’s Symphony No. 3
Leonard Bernstein conducts the Royal Danish Orchestra in the Symphony No. 3, “Sinfonia Espansiva,” by Carl Nielsen.
For George Walker, 1922-2018
The Lyric for Strings by George Walker.
What’s that tune in ‘Outlaw King’?
We noticed the new trailer (kind of violent) for “Outlaw King” on Netflix uses a famous classical tune as underscoring. The tune? Albinoni’s Adagio, of course, which probably wasn’t actually composed by Albinoni, but by 20th-century musicologist Remo Giazotto. Here’s
Bernstein: ‘Slava! A Political Overture’ (1977)
Another Bernstein rarity, this one written for the inaugural season of Mstislav Rostropovich (Slava) as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. There’s a nifty part for electric guitar partway through, and a taped sequence of political
Bernstein: ‘Elegy for Mippy II’
As we approach Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday on August 25, I’ve been featuring a number of his lesser-known pieces in this space. Here’s another: The “Elegy for Mippy II” for solo trombone, composed in the late 1940s. Mippy was the
Great moments in film music: ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’
This is the famous hula hoop sequence in the Coen brothers’ 1994 classic “The Hudsucker Proxy.” Though the film is set in late 1950s corporate America, the music of the Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian somehow suits it to a