Hellllloo everybody we're back at it again with another INSANE music moment. The case in point today comes from Raymond Lewenthal's performance of Adolf Henselt's Piano Concerto in F-minor, a lesser known piece that isn't played very often because, well, it's obscenely hard! We'll definitely see that in the moment we're looking at today.
 | ||||||||||||
| Here's the guy himself. If he were around today, I would compliment his compositions and then proceed to question his hair choices and strongly advise him to go to the nearest Great Clips. I mean... what on earth is this? |
This moment comes in the 2nd movement of his F-minor piano concerto.The 2nd movement of a three movement concerto is usually slow, which is the case here. It starts with a beautiful, lyrical, grateful theme in Db major, the submediant of F-minor. After a minute, the tone shifts completely to a sneakily epic secondary theme in C#-minor, which is enharmonically the same as Db-minor. The score gets incredibly messy here, with the piano having four different lines/staves/parts to play (two playing the melody in the bass, and two playing chords up higher to make the melody sound fancy).
OK SO HERE'S THE COOL PART (and better timestamps are down below). At 16:13, a development of the sneakily epic theme starts. At this point, especially at 16:22, the bass parts of the piano start absolutely GOING OFF. I mean, Lewenthal is just destroying the piano at this point. I can imagine this must be absurdly hard, and Lewenthal just blows this part out of the water. Such cool chords, the rhythm makes it 100x more epic, just really insane.
At 16:32, we have this weird but EPIC modulation, where we go around a carousel of different keys before landing in F-minor at 16:37, continuing on with this same minor theme that's been developed. The way that the orchestra builds in here and Lewenthal's energy and INSANE volume make it my favorite part of the whole piece. Here's a picture of the piano after Lewenthal finished this section.
OK just kidding... maybe.
TL;DR - Lewanthal absolutely destroys the minor theme of the second movement, and Henselt's bass hands and modulation in this section are insane.
Timestamps are below. Thanks for reading and I hope you all have an INSANE week!
12:50 - 2nd movement starts.
15:21 - Sneakily epic secondary theme starts.
16:13 - INSANE bass part starts.
16:22 - HELLOOOO epic bass part?
16:32 - Weird epic modulation + ORCHESTRA COMES IN.
No comments:
Post a Comment