Two Birthdays
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Don’t even think diet, since we have two birthday cakes to serve: for pianist Andrei Gavrilov and for composer Gustav Holst of “The Planets” fame (no, we aren’t playing that...).
An early evening birthday offering: Andrei Gavrilov (b. 1955), the extraordinary winner of the 1974 International Tchaikovsky Competition and artist of worldwide acclaim, plays Chopin’s “Butterfly” Etude. Later on, Gavrilov plays Prokoviev’s own arrangement for piano of ten character studies from his “Romeo and Juliet,” delineating them with such grace and bravura that the set becomes a theatrical experience.
Our second honoree, Gustav Holst (1874) is represented first by the London Collegiate Brass’s performance of “A Moorside Suite,” and later by the Munich Symphony’s performance of his “Cotswolds Symphony” under Douglas Bostock. While the emotional center of this work is its second-movement elegy—written in memory of the famous British Socialist and designer William Morris—the other three movements can be heard as a stroll throught the Cotswolds.
Now that we have had desert, here’s a magnificent entrée: Franz Schubert’s opus 90 Impromptus as served up by pianist Maria Joao Pires. Andre Comte-Sponville writes that
Schubert’s music is “like the soul brimming over, a tear or a smile, and that wrenching of the self, of the heart, at the moment before dying, that slowness, that languor, that unlimited solitude...”
An early evening birthday offering: Andrei Gavrilov (b. 1955), the extraordinary winner of the 1974 International Tchaikovsky Competition and artist of worldwide acclaim, plays Chopin’s “Butterfly” Etude. Later on, Gavrilov plays Prokoviev’s own arrangement for piano of ten character studies from his “Romeo and Juliet,” delineating them with such grace and bravura that the set becomes a theatrical experience.
Our second honoree, Gustav Holst (1874) is represented first by the London Collegiate Brass’s performance of “A Moorside Suite,” and later by the Munich Symphony’s performance of his “Cotswolds Symphony” under Douglas Bostock. While the emotional center of this work is its second-movement elegy—written in memory of the famous British Socialist and designer William Morris—the other three movements can be heard as a stroll throught the Cotswolds.
Now that we have had desert, here’s a magnificent entrée: Franz Schubert’s opus 90 Impromptus as served up by pianist Maria Joao Pires. Andre Comte-Sponville writes that
Schubert’s music is “like the soul brimming over, a tear or a smile, and that wrenching of the self, of the heart, at the moment before dying, that slowness, that languor, that unlimited solitude...”
