Kawai Piano Prices: Piano Concerto: Full Score (Study Score) [Spiral-bound] Review

Piano Concerto: Full Score [Spiral-bound]

if I recall Carter had written much of this while in West Berlin teaching some students, it follows the ;Double Concerto;(then subsequent equally powerful "Concerto for Orchestra") in some respects yet now projecting an unencumbered, an un- burdened free soloist. Carter said he merely wanted to write music he thought was interesting in the Sixties and so he could under the neo-liberal order.
This is a dark,thorny,fully impassioned work yet it allows "sunshine",reflection(s) inside the texture of things in density and timbre,and in complexity to come through.
The piano solo and the orchestra begin their arguments,their probings as equals, very democratic,very exciting,the incessant assymetrical rhythms and poly-rhythms between the soloist and the winds/ / /,the orcehstration is interesting for the pianoseems to mimic or stay within identical registers to whomever else in the orcehstra is uttering a declamation or idle intervallic thought/ / / no shifting of emphasis and function, of tossing and relaying music materials between, in fact the orchestra comes to "freeze" itself, in contracting itself in compacted clusters,cecoming less free as the work progresses,this while the piano tries to find an expressive way out of this cul de sac and never really does, even resorting to now full brutal dialogue( in the ;second movement;), the piano comes to ask questions, while maintaining its full virtuoso flair and expressive demeanor never succombing to the torrent of timbre in the orchestral forces.High register winds, snarling brass come to help cadences of moments, and the piano plunges right in to help disrrupt anything that claimed to be "unifying".At times as well the piano shares particular register to augment/further an argument as the "basso" regions with low tom-toms and tympani; The work is incredibly compact/impacted within two movements (of 10 minutes and 12 and one half minutes) respectively.This structure seems to work much better than the more fragmented "Concerto for Orchestra" which seems to meander and finds itself without purpose as it progresses,at least to this listener. On paper,in score I suspect all Carter makes clarity an art of shape and tone of rhythmic dimensions.In the "Piano Concerto" however Carter allows interestingly enough the full basso timbres of the piano to come through,single tones,like revealing yet another aspect of a persona, another side to a facial contour never seen prior in time. This can and does halt the rhythmic momentum,going forward,it does and does not at times, the rather dense convoluted textures which he allows are present as a given, and Gielen and Oppens(in their recording) are incredible in the clarity they bring to this complex score by anyones definition.There is a timbral beauty in Carter if you know where to look.His music looks forward by looking backwards;this gives his music a real powerful agenda,in that we come to re-experience, the quasi-romantic/expressionist charms and arrogant expressions.
Arnold Hauser in one of his "histories" on the visual arts says someplace that the entire "romantic" constitution comes from the"anarchic", the exposed,the abandoned premise, the unencumbered, of a new class fettered no more and finding new freedoms in merchant capitalism within the 19th Century. Well Carter is a traditional/modernist but one whose affinity resorts to these romantic dimensions of expressions in that his creative pallette did not venture to far afield,the center of his creativity remains within a predictable consciousness. His music will never surprise you,or take you unawares of some dimension of what modernity can do, or should do.I think that this is part of its wide appeal, that within the the alienation schemes practiced within the modernist language in music, Carter's music is knowable, one can come to follow it without too much arduous exchange within one's psychology.
There are exposed solo lines as well in the winds and a solo violin a la Richard Strauss primarily in the ;second movement; the flute, and the "new" timbre (for its time) the Bass Clarinet;nice round tones allowed to pass the tyrannical gaze of the piano. The work as it progresses wants to end itself, it becomes somewhat neurotic in not discovering a resolution for itself.It works nonetheless much better than the "Concerto for Orcehstra".

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