Having two pianists playing at the same time is not so common and it might be a challenge, but the experience resulted efficiently for Aaron Diehl and Dan Tepfer whose different minds and approaches to music complemented each other for an earnest performance on Thursday, April 27 at Greenwich House in NYC.
The event was part of a concert series named Unchartered, a program that features New York-based artists premiering new projects or meeting with new collaborators for the first time on stage.
The duo started predominantly jazzy with three standards in a row: “All the Things You Are”, “Everytime We Say Goodbye”, and “Honeysuckle Rose”.
However, the repertoire presented was drawn from different sources and an excerpt from J.S. Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue” was handled by incorporating lots of musical adventure. The music of Bach was revisited again at a later time with four of his famous “Goldberg Variations”.
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If Diehl was soulfully amazing in his depiction of a Phillip Glass piece, Tepfer deserved the effusive accolade he got from the audience with his interpretation of an Etude by the Hungarian composer Gyorgy
On Sunday, 14 October, Jeffrey Phelps, cello and Lee Jordan-Anders, piano, performed Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major, Opus 69 (1808) and Claude Debussy’s Sonata (1915)
The Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Opus 26 is one of the most famous violin concertos over the musical history. It is also considered to be the most renowned work by the German composer Max Bruch. I will begin with a short explanation of why I choose to analyse this piece followed by what makes this piece so remarkable. I will then present the musical context – German Romantic period – in which this piece was composed and discuss how it is representative of this period. Also, I will present briefly the biography of the composer and relate his life and style with this particular piece of music. After, I will explain the basic structure of a concerto, associate it with this violin concerto, and analyse how each movement is related. Then,
Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, is a two-part musical composition for organ, written by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750), a German composer, and musician of Baroque period, is known for its magnificent sound, classic, state-of-the-art rhythm having methodological command, with artistic splendor and intellectual gravity. Bach's abilities as an organist were respected throughout Europe during his lifetime but at that time he was not recognized as a great composer until a revival of interest and performances of his music in the first half of the 19thcentury. Nowadays he’s regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time. (Blanning, 2008)
When Bach was in Arnstadt when he was younger, the organ ordinarily lacked a 16-foot register on the keyboard; consequently, it sounds an octave lower than the normal 8-foot register. Accordingly, in order to create the effect, Bach used octave doubling; consequently, he continued the resounding effect of the opening bars; conversely, there is no octave doubling in any of Bach’s later organ works; moreover, the fugue sounds furious with its uninterrupted series of fast notes. Also, Bach felt embarrassed about his crude style, and he put the work aside; consequently, Bach lost a lot of his other early organ work completely. Conversely, the Tocca and the Fugue has an unstructured form, and that means that keyboard players can let their imagination run wild; as a result, Johann Gottfried Walther described the Toccata as a long piece in which both hands alternate, sometimes accompanied by long pedal notes. For this reason, Bach connected the Toccata’s freedom to the stylus phantasticus; moreover, stylus phantasticus was popular in North Germany from the seventeenth century; in addition, people described this style of composition as “freed from all constraint”. Moreover, it’s remarkable that Bach paired the toccata with the prelude and the fugue because it’s subject to strict compositional rules; nevertheless, the fugue derives its thematic material from the preceding part.
When the concert first began, the three instrumentalists walked with energy despite their age. The first song, “Sonata I in G-Major Op. 2, Nr. 1” by Michel Blavet, was a Baroque Sonata. There were five movements and was played by the harpsichord, flute, and cello. All movements of the song were polyphonic because of the three instruments that had different parts and equal importance. In the first movement, I noticed that the flute tended to rise in pitch. In the second movement, I noticed that the melodies often repeated. Throughout the rest of the song the tempo changed from fast to slow and the flute would usually take the lead. On the last movement, the cello and the harpsichord
The second piece that is discussed is Toccata in F major, by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is a solo piece that was performed in a unison and dissonant harmony. Surreal coordination and impressive pedal solo was extremely impressive and gave this particular piece a broad spectrum of dynamic change and tempo. Ascending and descending theme constantly repeated throughout this performance, alternating in crescendo and decrescendo, which brought life and movement to a classical piece.
21. During a performance of a Bach concerto grosso, what one would expect to hear?
He began to write preludes for organs but did not cover large- scale organization, when two melodies interact at the same time. A few years after playing for the church, Bach made a visit to Dieterich Buxtehude in Lubeck. This visit reinforced Bach’s style in music with the works he has made.
This concert is performed in the Avery Fisher hall within the Lincoln Center in New York City. It was performed on July 29, 2008. The orchestra that is performing is the 42nd Mostly Mozart Orchestra. The conductor is Louis Langrée. The two pieces being performed in this concert is Mozart's Symphony No. 40 and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
During the later years of his life Bach gradually withdrew inwards, producing some of the most profound statements of the baroque musical form. Bach’s creative energy was conserved for the highest flights of musical expression: the Mass in b
There were a total of four music pieces performed. They were “Overture from the Singspiel”, “Concerto in e minor”, “Concerto on b minor,opus 104”, and “Symphony#2 in b minor, opus 5”. I think pieces were performed belong to classical style.
The fugue during the baroque era and in B Minor Bass consisted of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass each of which were sung and performed in this orchestra production. Essentially each piece begins and ends with paired choruses, indicating tender arias in each movement. Each movement throughout Bach- B Minor Mass symbolizes spiritual convictions and during this era religion was very important. The performance was very well developed and conducted in my opinion. As I continued to listen to each piece and watch each performance I identified the meaning behind music in the baroque era. Each choral and instrumental section was split into distinct parts of the stage, allowing the best implicated sound to be conducted in the orchestra. When listening to each movement of Bach’s orchestral art it is heard to be simplistic but unique which catches the attention of all listeners. Due to this music being closely related to religion all the religious people of this era and of today adore the improvising of Bach not only in B Minor Mass but also in a variety of his other musical movements. In all, the description of this performance was a creative musical
On April 5th in Daniel Recital Hall Haochen Tan, a composer and a pianist, had a junior recital. He performed on the piano Etude-Tableau in C major, op. 33, No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Isolde’s Liebestod by Richard Wagner arr. Franz Liszt, and Caution to the winds by James Mobberley. Apart from this, he played piano part in his Trio for Flute, violin, and piano, and other musicians performed Reed Quintet composed by him. The piano was in the center of the stage and he wore a black suit. I really enjoyed his performance. The music that he composed was amazing even not to include his piano skills. As he said in the beginning, his music includes some Chinese elements. During this recital, Chinese international students, Fangzhou Wang and Kelly
At the Salzburg Festival in 2005, Valery Gergiev conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in its performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov‘s Scheherazade, Op. 35 (Classical Music db 1). He is a highly achieved, accomplished and revered conductor and is considered to have “attained a level of worldly power perhaps unmatched by any living classical musician” (qtd. by Alex Ross 1). All the wile, this orchestra is considered to be one of the premium orchestras in the World (Moderato 1). Between the two, a performance is created that instantly catches one’s attention with its gentle opening by trumpets, followed by a cello solo, and then the flutes follow with their soft, fluttering sound that makes the listener gently sway with the music. Images of a soft ocean breeze come to mind and its audience is mesmerized.
They say what’s old is new again. There is nothing new under the sun. What goes around comes around. History repeats itself. These may be just a few banal sayings, but they might hold true for classical music as well. Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin is one such example. Written during the neo-classical and neo-baroque movements of the early 1900s, this clever piece ties together French musical traditions, baroque styles, and World War I in just six short pieces. This essay will detail the origins of the suite form and the neo-classical neo-baroque movement, and compare Le Tombeau de Couperin with Bach’s French Suite no. 5 in G Major, BWV 816.