Thursday, September 6, 2012

Piano concerto

Piano Concerto (2006) is published and © by CF Peters. It was written for Marilyn Nonken and commissioned by Boston Modern Orchestra Project with funds from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress. The premiere was November 2, 2007 and there were five curtain calls. Here is the recording on BMOP/Sound.

The concerto is based around piano études. The first is rife with E-Machines-like repeated notes. All the movements, by the way, begin with a plucked A, in reference to Plucking A.



II. is based around a chromatic wedge, after Twelve-Step Program which Marilyn recorded.



III. started as a monoritmicon stealing, in a sense, from Absofunkinlutely.



IV. is based on scales, after Sliding Scales.



Before the premiere, I went to New York to work with Marilyn Nonken, for whom the piece was written, and she graciously agreed to be filmed playing these short excerpts, minus the orchestra, who were too expensive to bring to New York just be offscreen in a Flip Video.

This one is near the end of the first movement.




This is the first big piano stuff in the finale.



This is the cadenza, near the end of the finale.



This is the brief excerpt before the cadenza in which Marilyn has to play toy piano, and then both piano and toy piano.