schoenberg piano concerto

[ravel]

hey guys, how do u find the schoenberg piano concerto
well i loved it the first time i heard it, although ofcourse i idnt go nuts after the piece, but its true that the more i hear it, the mmore i like it,
i have heard brendel playing it with the radio bavarian symphony orhcastra, and  gould with boulez conducting i think, but i liked brendel more
anywazzzzz, as far as the piece itself is concenred, the piano writing for it seems so original and its the very way in which the piano has been handles, like some of those themese are so , strange, its just weirrd music, but i love it, and yes it is passionate music, but i really cant find the exact word to describe it,
anywazz,  comments??

[debussy_lover]

I'm not wild about the piece - I've heard it a few times on recording, and I played thought it once.  

Like most things Schoenberg wrote, it's very abstract.  I personally don't find that type of music very appealing or expressive.  

However, it certainly is an extremely well-crafted work.  No doubt it's one of the masterpieces of dodecaphonic writing, and a real "period piece".  

Also, the piano part isn't very pianistic.  It's thorny and dense, and really doesn't follow traditional models of pianistic texture.  Naturally that leads to interesting sounds, but the pianist suffers!

[ravel]

well, i ll have to agree with you in that the work is quite abstract just like so many other works of schoenberg,
but there are some parts which are really pianistic i think,  like in the first movement there are those parts in which the strings are playng relatively simple stuff but the piano is going all nuts , have to admit that those are really original piano sounds,
and yes one of the best things about taht work is that it is extremely well crafted,
so you played thru the piece? how hard is it as compared, to other pieces?
sahir
by the way debussy is also my favourite of favourites ,

[debussy_lover]

Ravel,

I haven't really played it, just read through it once.

I'd say it's difficult on the level of the Barber Sonata.  There's nothing impossible about it - it just requires a lot of concentration to study, since the patterns and textures aren't traditional.  There are a lot of spots where you have to study the score for a while before it starts to make some sort of sense.

[ramseytheii]

I love the Schoenberg concerto, although Gould never played it with Boulez, he recorded it twice, once with RObert Craft, and the other with Jean-Marie Baudet (who I think is Canadian).  Kyle Gann is a music critic with the Village Voice who recently published a book of past columns, one of which asserting it was "ridiculous" to imagine anybody remembering a sonority out of Schoenberg's piano concerto (he used that specific concerto to illustrate a larger point), since Schoenberg wrote according to a "language" rather than imagery.  But I think those who have heard the Schoenberg concerto and love it, would disagree, and deflect the "ridiculous" back the other way.  many sonorities from the concerto I love, I find grotesque at times, humorous, tender, mysterious, world-wise, all sorts of things.  Schoenberg also wrote "titles" for each of the movements, that did not make it into the publication of the score, which I can dig out of my library If anybody is interested.

Walter Ramsey