Every fan of classical music knows the feeling of seeing a contemporary composer on the program and inwardly despairing. But the overall incoherence is undeniable. The causes are many and complex: the abiding influence of atonal music from earlier in the century, the obsession with originality and shock value, the gradual transformation of classical music into a faux-scientific academic discipline. Many individual composers continued writing works of enduring value, but the great preponderance of classical music written over the past 75 years is deliberately opaque and aggressively ugly. You may be called a reactionary or a nostalgist if you acknowledge this fact aloud, but every concertgoer knows it. When her mother could not get her up in the morning for school, Alma had to confess what she was up to in the night.Something terrible happened to classical music during the 20th century, and especially after 1945. She always keeps a notepad by her bed, so she spent the next few hours writing it down. There was another interview about a time when Alma was 8 and had this tune came to her in a dream. The final movement was an elaboration of an old piece ‘Variations’ that’s been around a while.
What this recording misses was that for 15 seconds after this movement, the audience lulled into a state of bliss did not stir or make a sound.
The second movement was originally a lament for her beloved grandmother Michal Deutscher, who died in 2015, and is one of the most beautiful pieces I know. I remember one interview when she admitted “I had forgotten it was hard work composing a piano concerto”. So from March, she had until July to compose it, orchestrate it and learn the piano solo to concert standard, on top of learning the solo for the first movement of the violin concerto, which was greatly altered from an old viola sonata.
With the exception of a few bars from a discarded ‘Cinderella’ aria written in 2013, pretty well all the music in that movement was new. She had a few ideas for it though, and it was on a plane journey in March that the main melody came to her. She introduces every movement of both violin and piano concertos… except the first movement of the piano movement where she says “actually, I haven’t written it yet”. What is particularly remarkable about this piece was explained in Alma’s promotional video, recorded at home in February of that year entitled ‘Why Music Should be Beautiful’. I was at this very premiere which opened the Carinthia Summer Festival in 2017. I really hope you enjoy them as much I did.Īlma was actually 12 when she completed the piano concerto. I will share both the piano and violin concertos. Yes, hope that classical music did not peak in Europe in the 19 th and very early 20 th centuries and that I won’t be listening only to music composed by dead white men for the rest of my life.Īlma also plays violin and has composed a violin concerto, too. An eleven-year-old doing it and doing it so incredibly well gives me hope. I would also like to point out that composing a concerto is an incredible undertaking – you have to write music for a dozen instruments. Knowing my readers, I suspect they’ll take up that challenge. If you know any, please send them my way. (There may be some wonderful pieces I don’t know about. But I cannot name a single piano concerto, or a symphony, written by a modern, living composer that I enjoy listening to. 2 (composed in 1957), the adagio from the ballet Spartacus, by Aram Khachaturian (composed in 1954), and maybe a few others. There are exceptions, like Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. Most classical music I listen to was written between the 17 th and early 20 th centuries. As I paid closer attention to the video, I realized that this eleven-year-old girl was not just playing this concerto, she had composed it.Īnd what a concerto it was! It had the lightness of Mozart, the delicacy of Chopin, the dynamism of Mendelssohn, and the Hollywood (modern) flair of Korngold. However, when I started listening to Alma’s piano concerto, I did not recognize the music. I was glad to see this young virtuoso, but with shows like America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent, child prodigy performers are now a dime a dozen. Recently a reader shared a piano concerto performed by then-eleven-year-old Alma Deutscher from Britain.
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