In the great piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Bartók, the driving impulse is a kind of competition for eloquence. The piano declares itself with fierceness, tenderness or loneliness, only to find its sentiment amplified or elaborated upon by the orchestra. The orchestra suggests a new sentiment and the pianist responds, as if Read More
In the great piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Bartók, the driving impulse is a kind of competition for eloquence. The piano declares itself with fierceness, tenderness or loneliness, only to find its sentiment amplified or elaborated upon by the orchestra. The orchestra suggests a new sentiment and the pianist responds, as if Read More
A few evenings ago, after the end of a program at Alice Tully Hall celebrating the legendary keyboard virtuoso and composer Ferruccio Busoni, the pianist Garrick Ohlsson announced that he was going to do a famous encore by another virtuoso and composer who had played it so much that he had come to loathe it: Read More
Except for the Norwegians in Carnegie Hall the other night, I doubt whether there were more than a dozen people in the audience who had ever said the name Leif Ove Andsnes out loud. And yet there we were, several thousand strong, drawn to the Carnegie debut of a highly touted but little-heard Norwegian pianist Read More
