Tonight’s program presents three musical figures that span over 250 years of Western music history. Although one can immediately note considerable differences in each composer’s style or life story, there is one binding factor that brings all three of these composers together: Each composer had left his homeland and readily assimilated into a new culture – a new home where each conceived some of his greatest works.
With the release of a new CD of Karol Rathaus’s piano music, numerous performances of his compositions this season and an unabashed enthusiasm for the research of his works, I thought it would be ripe time-wise to write a blogpost on precisely what triggered my interest in this composer’s life & works.
An archive of recent radio interviews with pianist Daniel Vnukowski.
Is there some mystical blood of Chopin that runs through every Pole’s veins? Or, does every Polish Jew really eat lox and bagels for breakfast? Stereotypes have an odious way of lingering in the human psyche. We love them! They’re as savory as the oozing melt of Vanilla-Pecan-Caramel ice cream on a sweltering, humid day. Yet, deep down we all know just how false these banal pigeonholes truly are. For after the great sugar-rush and surge of dopamine release, we’re left with a jittering void that’s not easily overcome.
Walter Arlen is now almost 100 years old – and the entire century comes to life again together with his stories and his music. Walter Arlen’s First 100 Years paints an affectionate and multifaceted picture of a musician exiled in 1938, who only recently got to see his works performed late in life.
Rachmaninoff's Elegie Op. 3 (opening)
A brief history of this work:
This was one of the first works Rachmaninoff had performed in his public debut as a concert pianist in 1862, soon after graduating from the Moscow Conservatory. For this concert, he was earned a total of 50 rubles, or about 65 cents in today's money!
Elegie is of a funereal character and very much an extension of Chopin's style of piano writing, with an arpeggiated bass and bel canto treble line. However, it consistently makes wider use of the keyboard in the bass register and is darker in character, while exploring a unique harmonic relationship based on the tritone between E-flat7 and A7 in the climax.
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