[Liebermann Piccolo Concerto Pdf 11
Kody Coste
One of the most illuminating comments Mr. Liebermann made about influences to Keith in the video interview for the Flute Examiner was that he has been recently listening to, performing and thinking a lot about Schubert. This is immediately apparent since the first movement of this concerto is through composed, like many Schubert songs. It starts on the bottom of the flute range with a long recitative-like passage with minimal commentary from the orchestra. The next section begins by establishing the ostinati in the strings, mallet instruments and winds. When the flute solo continues, it is with long soaring melody over these subtle ostinati. The solo flute line hands the long melodic lines with the upper strings or brass while the winds continue with the ostinati. About half way into the movement, new melodic material is introduced first in the upper strings and piccolo that becomes the basis for the rest of the movement. The solo flute responds with the introduction of the first technical fireworks of the piece, full of fast runs and arpeggios. The solo alternates between melody and runs, with the scales getting faster (larger and larger tuplets per beat) and covering more range of the flute. The movement ends with the slow melody growing out of the last flurry of runs, getting more and more quiet, higher and higher, ending on an ethereal pianissimo high B for more than two measures.
Liebermann is most renown for his flute compositions. His Flute Sonata has been a repertoire cornerstone for over three decades, with 25 recordings to date. His (First) Flute Concerto, premiered by James Galway in 1987, quickly became equally popular and Liebermann has also penned a piccolo concerto and a concerto for flute and harp.
One could hardly imagine a finer sendoff for this new concerto than that provided by Hskuldsson, Mlkki and the orchestra. The CSO flutist brought his customary technical gleam and interpretive sensitivity to the score that his friend Liebermann composed so ideally for him. Mlkki balanced with consummate skill, tamping down the potential for schmaltz and directing the large forces flexibly with energy and precision.
The concerto premiere was preceded by music of Wagner. The Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin is one of the less-often excerpted Wagner curtain-raisers, and kudos to Mlkki for reviving it to open this program.
The music is mined from a scene late in the opera wherein the title knight is revealed to be a member of the Holy Grail. Mlkki led a glowing, luminous account of this radiant music, drawing violin playing of hushed delicacy in the opening section (and closing reprise) and building inexorably to a majestic yet tempered climax.
The Poco adagio was more emotionally restrained and less weighty than usual, sounding oddly like Carl Nielsen at times. Though here too Mlkki effectively underlined scoring and thematic contrasts, with an eruptive tutti to herald the transition into the finale. (The principal horn made little of his solos here either, or in the duetted passage with oboe.)
On Thursday, it looked initially like this might be another one of those times. Ying Fang has impressed locally with her Mozart performances at Lyric Opera as Zerlina and Pamina. While the Chinese soprano possesses the requisite light soprano and youthful tone, her singing was unevenly projected with the German text fitfully inaudible, even from the front of the lower balcony. (Granted, the hall acoustic can be unhelpful for high voices.)
Fang seemed to gain in security and confidence as the movement unfolded. With Mlkki drawing out the final stanza sensitively, the soprano managed to close the performance with singing that conveyed the right note of peaceful, relaxed contentment as the music slowly faded to silence. Miraculously, the audience held their applause until the conductor lowered her arm.
Saw the Wheaton concert on Friday, very nice performance of the Mahler, and the concerto was pleasant and well done. I can see why the CSO enjoys playing at Edman Chapel, the sound is beautiful, although the bathroom situation is a lot tougher than at Orchestra Hall.
As for Almond, I did find his playing earlier in the season to be a bit reticent, but today was his most forceful and beautiful playing yet. I was a big fan of David Cooper and greatly disappointed at his not being granted tenure, but I believe Almond is growing into his role. (And Cooper himself had some problems in his first year in that chair.)
If you think the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg doomed modern concert music to atonal dissonance, you haven't heard the crowd-pleasing works of Lowell Liebermann, who champions the return of lyrical melody and tonality to contemporary classical music. Dubbed a leader of the "new tonalists" by Time, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the 41-year-old Liebermann, like such other American composers as Aaron Jay Kernis, Richard Danielpour and George Tsontakis, has rejected the post-World War II avant-garde compulsion for complicated, esoteric cacophony in favor of conventional tonality -- the traditional harmonies found in most Western music from the Renaissance to rock.
Name performers and famous orchestras have rewarded his efforts to write music that actually communicates with audiences. In the last two years, Liebermann's works have been premiered by the New York Philharmonic, the Indianapolis Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nonetheless, critics devoted to the dissonant, modernist aesthetic have derided Liebermann's neo-romantic tonality as "an anachronism" and "artistic escapism," his music's accessibility as "pandering," and his unabashed use of traditional forms like the concerto as "derivative."
Such criticism has not stopped celebrated flautist James Galway, the Steinway Foundation, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk and numerous others from giving Liebermann commissions. Nor has it impeded the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from inviting him to take a three-year composer-in-residence position or performing eight of his works, three of which were world premieres. The controversies swirling around Liebermann's embrace of the romantic tradition have only boosted his prolific output, now totaling more than 80 works.
At a benefit luncheon last October, renowned pianist Van Cliburn was asked by a fellow Texan, ABC newsman Sam Donaldson, to name composers he liked in the last 100 years. The first name Cliburn dropped was Liebermann's.
Liebermann's musical interests were ignited by parental influence and fanned by personal ambition. Though born Feb. 22, 1961, in New York City, Liebermann spent his childhood in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens, a subway ride away from Manhattan. There he began studying piano at age 8, at his mother's insistence. By age 13, when the family relocated to suburban Westchester County, just north of New York, he had decided to become a composer.
At 14, Liebermann began to study composition with Ruth Schonthal, a distinguished pupil of Paul Hindemith, the foremost German composer between the two world wars, who was known for his neo-baroque style. Liebermann's edgy but forcefully tonal Piano Sonata No. 1, written at age 15, won the Music Teachers National Association first prize in 1978. At 17, he began a year as a music major at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and private lessons with David Diamond, a faculty member at the Juilliard School, to prepare for Juilliard's infamously tough admission exams.
Juilliard's composition department evaluates not only applicants' scores, but also their musicianship by written and oral exams. Liebermann had his orals before a formidable faculty jury of the giants of post-World War II modernism. It included Milton Babbitt, who took serialism to the extreme in rhythm, note length and dynamics; Elliott Carter, a composer of maximum density and rhythmic complexity; Roger Sessions, a thorny chromatic academic; Diamond, who was then in his dissonant phase; and the eclectic Vincent Persichetti.
Persichetti asked the young applicant to identify rhythmic patterns, key changes and intervals one by one as he played them for him. "One was so familiar, I went blank for a moment. Then I realized he was playing my first piano sonata," Liebermann recalls. "It was a dirty trick under that kind of stress and pressure."
Liebermann was the only composition major admitted to Juilliard's freshman class of 1979. He received a full-tuition scholarship (which lasted through his bachelor, masters and doctoral studies) and 12 credits for advanced standing. "I was 18 and the youngest composer in the department," he says.
Schonthal warned him not to be seduced by "the tremendous aesthetic dictatorship in the profession," which she defined as "no melodies, no lyricism, nothing but dissonance." She cautioned him to remain true to his own artistic vision.
That wasn't easy given the Juilliard faculty mind-set. Liebermann recalls, "I felt pressure to stick wrong notes into a passage to make it sound modern, or otherwise be accused of being old-fashioned."
Pressure came not only from faculty but from peers. When Liebermann's first cello sonata was heard in a Juilliard composer's forum, one of his colleagues accused him of self-indulgence for using a fifth (a traditional harmonic building block) in the accompaniment. Why, in keeping with the modernist aesthetic, hadn't Liebermann used a tritone (a three-whole-step interval)?
Finally, Liebermann bucked the prevailing aesthetic "out of stubbornness and integrity," says Korevaar. In 1983, Liebermann departed from David Diamond's dicta of dissonance when he wrote his Piano Sonata No. 2. Liebermann says, "Diamond didn't like the direction my music was going; it was too tonal."
Liebermann learned from Juilliard's instrumentalists as well, for whom he wrote works to showcase their talents and his own. He remembered meeting pianist Stephen Hough in Juilliard's cafeteria. "He was smoking a pipe wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and looking very middle-aged for 18," Liebermann says.
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