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| Wednesday, January 6
Concertos by Poulenc and Carter The American composer Ned Rorem likes to classify music as being either "French" or "German" -- by "French" Rorem means music that is sensuous, economical, and unabashedly superficial; by "German" Rorem means music that strives to be brainy, complex, and impenetrably deep. On today's date the Boston Symphony gave the premiere performances of two important 20th century piano concertos. The first, by Francis Poulenc, had its premiere in Boston under the baton of Charles Munch on today's date in 1950, with the composer himself at the piano. Poulenc's Concerto is a light, entertaining work in a holiday mood, with no pretension to profundity whatsoever. It is quintessentially "French" according to Rorem's classification. The other Piano Concerto, by the American composer Elliott Carter, also had its Boston premiere on today's date in 1967, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, with Jacob Lateiner as the soloist. Carter's Piano Concerto was written in Berlin between 1964 and 1965, a time when the Berlin Wall dividing the city was still new. Carter says he composed his concerto in a studio near an American target range, and one commentator at least hears the sounds of machine guns in the work's second movement. Carter himself compared the three woodwind solos in the same movement to the advice given by three friends of the long-suffering character of Job in the Bible. Needless to say to anyone familiar with Carter's music, Rorem would emphatically classify Carter's Concerto as "German" to the max! |  | Music Played on Today's Program: Additional Information:
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