This month, WQXR is taking 30 pieces from the 2014 Classical Countdown and asking music experts to give us their "next step" compositions.
Countdown Piece: Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F
Countdown Position: No. 81
For a next step: Try William Bolcom's Violin Concerto in D major
Choice by: Derek Bermel, composer, clarinetist and Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra
Recording available at Arkivmusic.com
If you fancy George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F what's a good next step? We put the question to Derek Bermel, a composer, clarinetist and artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra.
"I'd suggest William Bolcom's Violin Concerto in D major (1983) as a work to follow Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F (1925)," said Bermel, who is a former student of Bolcom's at the University of Michigan.
"Both works feature soaring melodies and draw their harmonic and rhythmic inspiration from jazz and popular idioms. Like Gershwin, Bolcom is a wonderfully gifted piano virtuoso who often performs his own works, such as the iconic Graceful Ghost Rag and the wonderfully inventive Cabaret Songs written for his wife, the soprano Joan Morris. However, while Gershwin's concerto was clearly designed as a showpiece for himself, Bolcom's was written for the violinist Sergiu Luca, a classical musician colleague reveling in his newly-acquired jazz technique." (The concerto has been recorded by Luca with the American Composers Orchestra.)
"Inspired by the playing of the great jazz violinist Joe Venuti (a contemporary of Gershwin with whom Bolcom once jammed), the work is a true hybrid," said Bermel, "combining bluesy lyricism with pulsating rhythms and more than a hint of crunchy chromaticism and polytonal clusters. Bolcom is a master orchestrator; just listen to the way he contrasts the colors of winds and strings in the gorgeously lush and moody second movement.
"And the final movement includes many of Venuti's signature inflections – including sliding sixths and alternating left- and right-hand pizzicato (string plucking) – that's pure danceable joy in its unapologetically infectious melodies."
Watch a complete performance of the Bolcom Concerto below, performed by soloist Benjamin Schmid with the Spanish Radio and Television Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kalmar:
