Much-honored American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich has managed to satisfy both specialist audiences and general concertgoers over her career, often writing works that develop accessible material in a rigorous way. This disc collects three Zwilich works for piano and orchestra, and the interest begins with the fact that none of them can really be described as a piano concerto. Instead, the piano-orchestra dialogue is mapped onto other content, programmatic in two cases. The nonprogrammatic piece is the Millennium Fantasy, ...
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Much-honored American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich has managed to satisfy both specialist audiences and general concertgoers over her career, often writing works that develop accessible material in a rigorous way. This disc collects three Zwilich works for piano and orchestra, and the interest begins with the fact that none of them can really be described as a piano concerto. Instead, the piano-orchestra dialogue is mapped onto other content, programmatic in two cases. The nonprogrammatic piece is the Millennium Fantasy, based on an unidentified folk song that Zwilich learned from a family member; it appears fragmentarily throughout and is assembled at the end of the two-movement work. Images (1986) consists of short movements depicting paintings in the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, along with one expressing Zwilich's reaction to the museum as a whole; many listeners will be hard pressed to catch the representational language here. Not so with the final work, Peanuts Gallery,...
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