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4.0 out of 5 stars
Close-mindedness = willfull ignorance, Jan 5 2004
I know I'm not gonna change anyones minds by this. I just think it's a little sad that some people can be so judgemental about music they don't understand. This music is not "sick". It's just difficult. And why would anyone think Reich is "disqusting" just because he's not an "avant garde" comnposer? I listen to everything from Bach and Bartok, to Monk and Jimi Hendrix, To Tool and Pantera, Not because I think it's "cool" that I listen to this stuff, but because I enjoy it. Music is music. And it can only expand your mind if your mind it not closed to begin with.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
nice, Nov 22 2001
By A Customer
Two beautiful pieces by America's best composer in all times. American music is not only the big orchestra business (Gershwin), Broadway musicals in symphonic dress (Bernstein), brainwashing disgusting minimalistic pop music (Reich, Glass), or chance & noise (nothing wrong just with this, unless it is all one can do...). Note that a lot of people do not like his music. Do not care about them. After all, who cares if they listen?
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5.0 out of 5 stars
excoriated orchestral gestures,marvelously chamber like, Sep 24 2001
This 'Piano Concerto' is,ex cathedra a real achievement for the Americana erudite dodecaphonic language. And as well its esteemed,a eudaemonia place within Babbitt's oeuvre. Only the equal orchestral structural largesse of his "Relata"(I and II) for Orchestra mounts similar vainglorious habitations. Andrew Mead's excellent excursions in his erudite book into Babbitt's works makes the fascinating complexity come to life here, the various tone structures,trichordal,hexachordal combinatorials, the divisions of the orchestral registers into four places. The soloist piano also enters this labyrith formidably with weighted arrays,(tone configurations) as solo arenas, and superimposed materials with the orchestral forces mirabile mimetic in gesture..
If you know the lapidarian sinuous beauty of Babbitt's various piano solos, as "Canonical Form", or the first high unbounded energy revealed in "Three Compositions" from 1947, or the gentle miniaturist moments found in these works as 'Duet' for his daughter, this 'Concerto' scours the lifeworld of high mastodonic intensity, and is not breeze easy listening,the kind for various fatuous market Glassite epigoni.This piece requires a committment, an espousal of the highest moments of this genre,with pretensions(leave them at the doorstep) of hauteur so frequently levelled at Babbitt. His music has an intense direct immediacy,powerfully wrought,hortatory,with veiled histrionics. One is required to think of timbre,parametrical density, weight, array and lyne shapes, rhythmic projections, penetrability of orchestral timbre.
The work functions well as excoriated full blown within the context of the modernist orchestral concerti.I can only think of Elliott Carter's deeply penumbral 'Piano Concerto', one he wrote in Berlin, as a work which equals the weight of this. Although Babbitt's by comparison seems a bit more loosely focused and playfull with forever shifting densities.Repeated hearings are required.
In contrast however the chamber setting of the 'Head of the Bed' is not as successful, the voice has presented a set of creative problematics for the dodecaphonic language. The complex rhythmic projections and the deep tone concentrations to my mind robs the voice of its most profound primordial canto like dimensions.
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