Tippett Piano Concerto

[melengi]

Just wondering if anyone has played it as it's my new favourite piano concerto and the most beautiful and poetic work in the idiom (IMHO! i'm sure most or all of you will disagree). I'd love to tackle it at some stage but i'm up to my eyeballs in other work for the foreseeable future.

If so is it a particularly difficult concerto to play?

[ahinton]

Just wondering if anyone has played it as it's my new favourite piano concerto and the most beautiful and poetic work in the idiom (IMHO! i'm sure most or all of you will disagree). I'd love to tackle it at some stage but i'm up to my eyeballs in other work for the foreseeable future.

If so is it a particularly difficult concerto to play?

Its solo part is very clumsily written by a non-pianist, though it doesn't sound that way; I find it a very attractive and appealing work.

Best,

Alistair

[melengi]

Its solo part is very clumsily written by a non-pianist

See i don't neccessarily regard that as such a bad thing, if a composer is freed of the restraints of writing idiomatically for the piano it can result in very interesting textures although it might be more tricky to get your fingers around.

[mephisto]

Some pianist-composers like Alkan do also compose very strange and uncomfortable music(pianisticly speaking).

I will listen to this piece later today.

[jre58591]

ive had john ogdon's recording for a while. is it worth listening to, honestly?

[melengi]

i actually don't like ogdon's recording but the piece definitely is.

[ahinton]

i actually don't like ogdon's recording but the piece definitely is.

I do and the piece is well worth learning (for all the patience it will likely demand). As far as pre-1960 British piano concerti go, it doesn;t quite have the pianistic richnesses of Bowen at his best, nor is it a match for the more monumental concerto by his older friend and one-time colleague Alan Bush (notwithstanding the ghastly unpoetry that he sets in its finale in such a way that he somehow manages to transcend its cheap tawdriness - no mean achievement), but it has a lyrical impulse that is very much Tippett's own and it dates from the period - the 1950s - in which he wrote his finest music, I think (I am thinking of the Second Symphony and his first opera A Midsummer Marriage).

Best,

Alistair