Dearest Reader: I apologize for the delay in reviewing this piece. My life suddenly got busy, busy, busy when I accepted a long-term substitute teaching position at a local middle school to help out a friend (the principal of the school). My last day of teaching will be in early June, and then I have a short trip to Chicago and Detroit. Once I get back, I'll finish up my comments and rating for this piece (on of before June 17th), and then I'll get back on track as of June 18th with a new piece. At that point, I'll be back to retirement life! Stay tuned! ; ) Ugh! I've procrastinated long enough, and it's time for me to get back into the swing of things! As you know from the note above, my "life of leisure" as a retiree got interrupted when I agreed to go back into teaching as a long-term substitute to help out a principal-friend of mine at a local middle school. I had a blast, but now I'm back to care-free days -- and I even made the trip to Chicago and Detroit (as mentioned above) -- and...
Well, I've just been putzing around -- so enough putzing! (Is that how you spell "putzing"?) I need to finish this review and then move on! LOL. I listened to Bortkiewsicz' concerto way back in April when I first made this post, and I'm listening to it again now as I type. I chose the work because I'd had decent luck this year with piano concertos (i.e., I'd found some real gems), so I had high hopes; alas, the overall result (i.e., my reaction, review and rating) did not live up to the height of my hopes. Back in early April I reviewed a piano concerto by Victor Kosenko, and I wrote, "Think the Tchaikovsky concerto in B flat minor, the opening of the Grieg A minor concerto, the Warsaw Concerto, or the Brahms No. 1 in D minor. There is nothing more exciting than a pianist pounding out a piano line in an explosion of power and passion with a rousing orchestration behind it – and THAT is the Kosenko concerto in a nutshell." Well, the same can be said for the Bortkiewicz concerto. There's excitement, there's pounding, there's power and passion, there's even a trill in the upper registers of the piano that plays on for twenty measures. However, there doesn't seem to be any real cohesion to the concerto. Oh, there are parts that are Rachmaninoff-like, Tchaikovsky-ish, Grieg-y, and even Gershwin-esque. But as a whole, the work is not greater than the sum of its parts. It's pleasant to listen to and certainly exciting at times -- but it's really a hodgepodge of themes presented in a patchwork of pounding and prowess. Meh.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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