Concertinos

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from 19 August 2016. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast228

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This week’s selection from the Podcast Vault has to be thought of in the context of the sequence of Listener Guides being proposed in the coming days. These provide something of an exploration of the concerto as a genre, from the Concerto Grosso to the “modern” view of the concerto as the friendly duel between orchestra and soloist.

The works presented today are “shorter” – some of them in a single movement, others laid out over more than one – but remain mostly intimate in their setting and last generally no more than 15 minutes.

As my weekly “bonus” YouTube share, I retained a work (in fact, a pair of works) that feature one of this week’s soloists – pianist Alain Lefèvre – in a pair of what I would call “extended” chamber works. As I stated before in my Piano Quintets Listener Guide, one way of looking at a quintet is as a “mini concerto” with the piano “dueling” with the strings. In contrast to his youthful concertino, an older (and probably more frustrated) André Mathieu puts out a romantically-inspired quintet, full of musical ideas but clearly limited in his ability to exploit them fully. The other work is Chausson’s Concert for piano, violin and string quartet – a bit of a double concerto (rather than a piano sextet) with string quartet as a backdrop.

The complete playlist also features Mathieu’s piano trio. [Album details]

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lTUfsrytIUkyji0gbPL7dDs93yOBAUzqw

I think you will (still) love this music too.