Vivian Fine's Concertante for Piano and Orchestra


This March, the Daily Classical Music Post will introduce you to some of the most wonderful music ever composed—and, yes, it will all be by women composers!

https://youtu.be/U79xEl3WUp8

 

Vivian Fine (1913–2000) was one of America’s most important composers in the 20th century. She was best known for her chamber music, but she wrote in every genre. She wrote extensively for voice. She composed two chamber operas, The Women in the Garden (1978) and Memoirs of Uliana Rooney (1994). Fine received several awards in her career, including an individual NEA grant for The Women in the Garden and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Fine studied harmony and counterpoint with Roger Sessions. It was during this time that she composed her first orchestral work, Concertante for Piano and Orchestra (1944). Heidi Von Gunden wrote, "The Concertante for Piano and Orchestra comes at the end of Fine’s study with Sessions. . . . When Sessions saw sketches of the Concertante both teacher and student sensed that lessons were no longer needed, Sessions saying, 'Now we are colleagues'." Leslie Jones wrote, "The Concertante, one of Fine’s few piano works to be recorded, is a two-movement piece that weaves independent solo piano lines into its rich orchestral colors. The first movement’s long, sweeping melodies are indeed diatonic (perhaps influenced by Sessions), but the comment, 'There is no trace of her former radicalism and cerebralism,' is hardly accurate. Although the Concertante is clearly more tonal than compositions from her earlier period, dissonance is still present, but is now used as a point of departure from tonality, rather than as the basic framework."

My classical music post for today is Vivian Fine's Concertante for Piano and Orchestra.

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