麥克道威: 鋼琴協奏曲/管絃樂作品,第一集 王夏音 鋼琴 約翰.威爾森 指揮 BBC愛樂管弦樂團 Xiayin Wang, John Wilson / MacDowell: Orchestral Works Vol. 1

麥克道威: 鋼琴協奏曲/管絃樂作品, 第一集
王夏音 鋼琴
約翰.威爾森 指揮
BBC愛樂管弦樂團

2024年12月份留聲機雜誌編輯推薦最佳新片之一

Edward MacDowell was the most highly regarded American composer of his generation, and the first to acquire a truly international reputation. Born in New York, he briefly studied piano as a teenager at the Paris Conservatoire, but quickly left to explore what he regarded as the more congenial musical environment in Germany. He studied piano and composition in Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and then Frankfurt. After graduating in 1880, he remained in Germany for four years, before returning home, first to Boston, for eight years, and then finally to New York where he became Columbia Universitys first Professor of Music. The various romantic influences that shaped the style of the First Concerto include the music of Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Grieg, whilst the technical demands on the soloist reveal MacDowells prowess as a pianist. MacDowells enthusiasm for the symphonic poem is reflected here by the inclusion of Lancelot und Elaine and Lamia. The former was inspired by the Arthurian legend as told by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. The work is extremely narrative, and employs Wagnerian Leitmotifs to depict each of the characters. Lamia, written some two years later and based on the poem by John Keats, was neither published nor performed in the composers lifetime. MacDowell had planned another symphonic poem, based on the French mediaeval tale La Chanson de Roland, but the work was never completed, and the two fragments included here are all that remain. Woodland Sketches, a set of ten piano miniatures, were inspired by the idyllic environment of the MacDowells farm, in New Hampshire. The first of these – 'To a Wild Rose – is by far the composers most famous piece, and made MacDowell a household name in both America and Europe.