These three piano concertos have different stories behind them but are all imbued with the optimistic spirit of 1920s and 1930s modernism. Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto are animated by the rhythmic thrill of that era, in which march rhythms, like echoes of the recent war, got mixed with those of jazz, the latest fad throughout Europe. This music was being perceived as championing a new energy, as well as suggesting a new conception of progress in music, one that rejected both late-Romantic weariness and Expressionist self-destruction. Jazz scales and melodic gestures are explicitly cited by Ravel, while Shostakovich sticks to his favorite military rhythms and sarcastic melodic contours. The solo performer, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, is also the composer of the opening Rhapsody in Black, which, although written a few years ago, looks back to that same era and those same influences by reworking material from George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess. This performance makes use of the G-Phil Virtual Orchestra, a flexible Web-rooted application that can be adapted to one’s personal interpretation.
