At A Glance
When Carl Nielsen composed his Helios Overture in 1903, he was on the path to becoming Denmark’s most eminent composer. He spent that winter and spring in sunny Athens, where he told a friend, “Helios burns all day and I am writing away at my new solar system.” When the Overture was published, he attached this description: “Stillness and darkness—Then the sun rises to joyous songs of praise—Wanders its golden way—quietly sinks in the sea.”
Magnus Lindberg emerged in the 1980s as part of a group of Finnish composers who made tremendous impact on the contemporary music scene. Early on he was drawn to extreme complexity, but he later developed a compositional mode that might be called “classical modernism.” His Piano Concerto No. 3, being premiered this week, is in the line of the virtuoso concerto, making strenuous demands of the pianist while incorporating the solo part into a richly conceived symphonic texture.
While most concertos are scored for a solo instrument accompanied by orchestra, Béla Bartók revived an older meaning of the term, in which all the instruments of the ensemble are combined into a harmonious whole. Bartók, who was ill in New York after emigrating from Hungary, wrote: “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first moment and the lugubrious death-song of the third to the life-assertion of the last one.” Premiered by the Boston Symphony in 1944, it was among Bartók’s final works.
Magnus Lindberg emerged in the 1980s as part of a group of Finnish composers who made tremendous impact on the contemporary music scene. Early on he was drawn to extreme complexity, but he later developed a compositional mode that might be called “classical modernism.” His Piano Concerto No. 3, being premiered this week, is in the line of the virtuoso concerto, making strenuous demands of the pianist while incorporating the solo part into a richly conceived symphonic texture.
While most concertos are scored for a solo instrument accompanied by orchestra, Béla Bartók revived an older meaning of the term, in which all the instruments of the ensemble are combined into a harmonious whole. Bartók, who was ill in New York after emigrating from Hungary, wrote: “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first moment and the lugubrious death-song of the third to the life-assertion of the last one.” Premiered by the Boston Symphony in 1944, it was among Bartók’s final works.
