Alma Deutscher, piano concerto (world premiere, July 2017)
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This was the world premiere of Alma's piano concerto in July 2017, at the Carinthian Summer Festival, with Vienna Chamber Orchestra, conductor: Joji Hattori. The concerto has 3 movements:
I - Allegro 0:26, II - Adagio 17:09, III - Allegro giocoso 26:52
Leading Austrian critic, Dr Wilhelm Sinkovicz, wrote about the concerto: "The world turns in a circle, but always sprouts new, beautiful flowers, if one only lets them sprout. Alma Deutscher’s music is full of extraordinarily original ideas and genuine surprises… Even just the transition from the cadenza to the coda of the first movement reveals the composer’s originality. And how, just before the final chord, she charmingly dissolves the harmonic knot which had been tied with a harmonic Coup in the first bars of the concerto – that mesmerizes. (Die Presse)
Alma wrote about her concerto:
The first movement represents the conflict between darkness and light. The orchestral introduction has just two happy bars of E-flat major in the beginning, but it then plunges into darkness on the third bar. The rest of the introduction is in minor, but the entrance of the piano brings back the light, with a much happier version of the orchestral theme. The darkness tries to come back at some points, especially at the very end, but the light finally overcomes it.
The main theme of the second movement came to me when I was very sad, I was improvising on my grandmother’s piano a few days after she died. The movement is in a rather unusual key, B-flat minor, which is perhaps not so comfortable for the orchestra, but it's the key in which I first heard the melody in my head, and I did not want to change it.
The third movement is a set of variations on a theme which I heard in the middle of the night when I was eight years old. During the movement, there is quite a lot of argument between the soloist and the orchestra. But in the end, the soloist and the orchestra make peace, and continue playing happily together.
