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Noel Mewton-Wood

biographical notes from Wikipedia, links to more information

 

Noel Mewton-Wood (November 20, 1922 – December 5, 1953) was an Australian-born concert pianist who achieved some fame during his short life.

Born in Melbourne, he studied at the Melbourne Conservatorium until the age of fourteen. After further studies at London's Royal Academy of Music, Mewton-Wood spent time with Artur Schnabel in Italy.

In March 1940 he returned to London for his debut performance at Queen's Hall, performing Beethoven's third piano concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham. He later performed in France, Germany, South Africa, Poland, Turkey, and Australia.

At the age of thirty-one, Mewton-Wood committed suicide by drinking prussic acid, apparently blaming himself for the death of a friend. The notes written by a friend of Mewton-Wood, John Amis, for the reissue of the Bliss Concerto recording, indicate that Mewton-Wood was gay and was depressed by the recent death of his lover.

Mewton-Wood's The Times obituary of December 7, 1953 described his playing style at his debut performance:

At once his remarkable control and his musicianship were apparent: the ascending scales in octaves, with which the pianist first enters, thundered out with whirlwind power, but he could summon beautiful cantabile tone for the slow movement and the phrasing of the rondo theme was admirably neat for all the rapidity of the tempo; a true understanding of the relationship in concerto between soloist and orchestra, and of the soloist's part in ensemble, betokened the musician, the potential chamber performer.

In addition to Beethoven, Mewton-Wood's repertoire included:

• Tchaikovsky's three piano concertos, G major sonata, and Concert Fantasy;
• Busoni's Fantasia contrappuntistica and Piano Concerto;
• Sir Arthur Bliss's Piano Concerto (as Mewton-Wood was an exponent of this piece, Bliss wrote him a piano sonata);
• Tippett's song cycle The Heart's Assurance;
• Hindemith's Ludus tonalis;
• and works by Britten, Schubert, Liszt, Mahler, Schumann, and Bartók.

He also composed chamber music, a piano concerto, ballet music, and music for the 1944 film Tawny Pippit.

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Mewton-Wood

See also notes on Mewton-Wood at:

• Australian Dictionary of Biography
• Metafilter blog discussion
• Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive

 

 

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4

notes from Wikipedia

 

Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58, was composed in 1805–1806, although no autograph copy survives.

 

Musical forces and movements

The work is scored for solo piano and an orchestra consisting of a flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. As is standard for concertos, it is in three movements:

I. Allegro moderato (G major)

II. Andante con moto (E minor)

III. Rondo (Vivace) (G major)

 

Premiere and reception

The Fourth Concerto was premiered by Beethoven himself at a private concert given in March, 1807 at the palace of his patron, Prince Lobkowitz. However, the public premiere was not until 22 December 1808 in Vienna at the Theater an der Wien. Beethoven again took the stage as soloist. This was part of a marathon concert which saw Beethoven's last appearance as a soloist with orchestra, as well as the premieres of the Choral Fantasy and the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Beethoven dedicated the concerto to his friend, student, and patron, the Archduke Rudolph.

A review in the May 1809 edition of Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung states that "[this concerto] is the most admirable, singular, artistic and complex Beethoven concerto ever."[citation needed] However, after its first performance, the piece was neglected until 1836, when it was revived by Felix Mendelssohn. Today, the work is widely performed and recorded, considered one of the central works of the piano concerto literature.

 

Movements

 

I. Allegro moderato

The first movement opens with the solo piano,[1] playing simple chords in the tonic key before coming to rest on a dominant chord. After a poetic pause of two and a half beats, the orchestra then enters in B major, the major mediant key, thus creating a tertiary chord change. This becomes a motif of the opening movement.

The orchestra states the main theme in B major, dropping through the circle of fifths to a cadence in the tonic, G major. The theme is then stated again, this time in stretto between upper and lower voices. A very strong cadence in the tonic, withering away within one bar, introduces a transitional, modulatory theme with restless triplet accompaniment, also containing hints of stretto. The music moves to the minor mediant key, B minor, while its dynamic is reduced to pianissimo, at which point material from the opening theme returns. Through a rising bass line and sequential harmonies, the music regains the tonic key (on a dominant pedal) with a new theme derived from bars 3, 4, and 5. The final cadence is delayed for several bars before the material from the opening bar resurfaces as the movement's closing theme, accompanied by a tonic pedal over forte dominant chords.

Felix Salzer, on page 195 of his book entitled Structural Hearing, says the following about this opening, "[It is] one of the most fascinating substitutions of the entire literature...The whole passage appears as a most imaginative prolongation of interruption, the post-interruption phrase starting with a B-Major chord boldly substituting for the tonic. In addition, this post-interruption phrase introduces a very interesting melodic parallelism in form of an augmentation of the end of the pre-interruption phrase one step higher." In other words, the piano plays the antecedent phrase of this period, and the orchestra answers with ^3 supported not as chordal third of the tonic G, but rather as a root of a #III (B major) chord which subsitutes for the localized tonic G major chord. After a series of parallel tenths, (which contains the seeds of the secondary theme's parallel 10ths) ^3 is supported by tonic, which proceeds to ^2 supported by II6 and V7 before achieving the end of the period with a PAC. (WMH)

The piano's entrance resembles an Eingang, an improvisatory passage from Mozart's day that would have occurred after the orchestra's last unresolved dominant chord, but before the piano played the main theme. Beethoven captures this improvisatory style by accelerating the rhythm in the piano part, from eighths, to triplets, to sixteenths, and finally in a scale that rushes downward in sixteenth sextuplets. A long preparation is then made before a tonic cadence duly arrives, and the orchestra once again takes up the main theme.

 

II. Andante con moto

The second movement is widely associated with the imagery of Orpheus taming the Furies (represented, respectively, by the piano and unison strings) at the gates to Hades. It was long thought that Franz Liszt had been the first to suggest this association, although, as musicologist Owen Jander pointed out (Jander, 1985), it was probably first used by Adolph Bernard Marx in his 1859 biography of Beethoven. The movement's quiet E minor ending leads without pause into the C major chords that open the finale.

The solo cadenza at the end of the movement involves pedaling directions that cannot be executed on the modern piano; for discussion see Piano history and musical performance [at Wikipedia].

 

III. Rondo (Vivace)

In contrast to the preceding movements, the third movement, in traditional rondo form, is characterized by a very rhythmic theme. The main theme begins in the subdominant key of C major before correcting itself to reach a cadence in the tonic G major.

 

Cadenzas

Cadenzas for the Fourth Piano Concerto have been written a number of pianists and composers throughout its history; these include Clara Schumann, Feruccio Busoni, Hans von Bülow, Ignaz Moscheles, Camille Saint-Saens, Anton Rubinstein, Nikolai Medtner, Eugèn d'Albert, Leopold Godowsky, and Samuel Feinberg.

 

 

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_No._4_(Beethoven)