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One Response to “blake’s piano “concerto”?”

1. George King Says:
   December 9th, 2007 at 8:07 am

   There is no reason to resort to the language of sprokiesverhale to elucidate what is after all a fairly straightforward concept to the sophisticated readers of Plus. All one needs is a good Italian dictionary and a reliable music reference work. These will reveal that the primary meaning of the Italian word ‘concertare’ is in fact not ‘om te midde van struweling te wedywer’ but rather ‘to arrange, agree, get together’, a sense that has been understood for several centuries. The term also means, in a musical context, to rehearse and to harmonize.

   The idea of confrontation and competition in a concerto between soloist and orchestra is a typically 19th-century gloss on the concept, and one that has long reached its sell-by date. There is really nothing strange about the idea of creating a piano concerto (especially in the 21st century!) that does not conform to a tired definition, and one that wasn’t around when the genre was created in the first place. Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto is really a vast piece of chamber music, and certainly none the worse for that. Come to think of it, Tippett’s marvellous piano concerto — to name just one work from the past 100 years or so — is certainly not in the ‘great tradition’ in that sense.

   But then, in a country where very little 20th-century music sees the light of day, even of the mainstream variety. Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ has not, I think, been performed anywhere here since the early 1960s, under the great man himself. And so-called music education in this country is also pitifully restricted, for the most part, to learning useless lists of DWM composers and their works. So it’s hardly surprising that even critics are ill-informed about what has been going on in music for decades. We also have a curious tradition in this country of trying to restrict public taste in matters musical. Anything from after 1907 is regarded as ‘difficult’ or ‘audience-unfriendly’, unless it’s so appallingly naive or timid that few are likely to take offence.

   I predict that Blake’s Piano Concerto is much more likely to get performances in the next decade or two than most of the South African piano concertos lying around in dusty, musty archives.

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