New York Variations

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Free Music Notes for New York Variations

Free Music Review: deeply probing piano playing of densely wrought pieces.
Hit: 5 Stars

Copland's Piano Variations was quite an achievement for its time 1930,with thepolitical,cultural disturbances in the world the unthinkable not yet even thought of yet of Europe.Written after Copland had returned from a summer in Europe absorbing creative notions of a truly unique American music. The work is built from cells,and major-minor sonorities reduced at times to single tones C and C# which rock the foundations of the works deeply sonoric constitution.E major trying to reconstitute or proclaim itself. You can hear the entire literature of serious American music in this piece, the young Bernstein had learned great profundities here. I've heard this piece played with a bit more restraint taking fully the gentle emotive ways of what we now know as Copland's musical signature,i.e. the thin orchestration, the sparce musical statements projected through livily dance,folk rhythms reoccuring and repeating. The final Allegro con brio has a jazzy way as well yet not giving up its original creative premise.

Corigliano as well reveals a compactedness of structural design, a density here, perhaps the lifeworld of New York City renders this. The musical ideas are deeply romantic with quiet reflections after roaring arrogant statements ripping through the entire keyboard. The Ben Weber as well could have been written yesterday who can tell with the emotive plurality and time-hopping postmodernity we have been subjected to and allow ourselves within today's concert repertoire. It seems as if time has stopped nothing "wears" their unique durational frame anymore. Weber largely self-taught has a romantic experience to portray as well with the entire keyboard of broken chordal sequences containing his thoughts.

I don't know what the fuss is over the Tsontakis,"Ghost Variations" if it a masterpeice? well it is a very weak and transparent one. It is simply a good inspired piece that relies quite heavily on dance-like and toccata-like rhythms to keep its argument high in the air. I can safely see its accessible appeal, it rolls off the keyboard quite nicely without any deeper inner reflections except magical ones(its tremoli chords) to halt the pent-up passages. It reminded me of the "Fantastique" persona of Hector Berlioz actually or the self-indulgent(yet provocative) chordal excursions of the recluse Charles Alkan. It had that phantasmagoric quality of trancedence toward another world.

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