I didn't get into classical music till I was in high school. I met a guy on a streetcar who gave me a recording of Maurice Andr playing classical trumpet concerti. Until then I'd only been interested in Clifford Brown and Miles, but I started liked that, so I got some more of his albums, and when I was 14, I won a competition to play the Haydn trumpet concerto at high school. Yeah, I got better quickly.
Quotes about concerto (16 Quotes)
I have little use for Grieg or my Concerto, this is not only extraordinary piano playing, it is an entirely new way of playing the piano.
Harmony is pure love, for love is a concerto.
Playing a concerto with Zubin is like being surrounded by a well-loved, cashmere-lined silk glove.
A review of his work His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.
This was a huge, huge undertaking. I composed this concerto from the ground up. It took about two years total to compose, but there were interruptions when I was touring and making rock albums,
It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away from her mind. The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a 'NO' flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying There is no necessity for pain why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom ... The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion and of a desperate quest.
Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?'
When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.
In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.
The way it works: The orchestra plays a few selections of its own and I terminate the first part of the programme on piano, usually with a movement from a Mozart concerto.
This kind of prelude was succeeded by the concerto itself which he executed with a degree of spirit and firmness that no one has ever pretended to equal.
You get more nervous in front of a lot of people. That's why, when you play a concerto, you play with a small orchestra, in some place where you don't feel that it is as important as Carnegie Hall.
The music of his Fifth Concerto streamed from his keyboard, past the glass of the window, and spread through the air, over the lights of the valley. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing buy the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
At the end of the competition, I played the Liszt concerto and I felt my head was on the block. Well, I won.
I'd forget the piece just before I went out to do the concerto, the panic was too great. This was not anything that gave me pleasure. This was fulfilling somebody else's dream.