The Concerto for Cello, Piano, and String Orchestra is a composition for solo cello, piano, and a large string orchestra by the American composer Ralph Shapey. The work was composed for the cellist Joel Krosnick and the pianist Gilbert Kalish and was first performed at Tanglewood in 1989. It was first performed by Krosnick, Kalish, and the Berkshire Music Chamber Orchestra under the composer on July 31, 1989. The piece was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Music and shared the top Kennedy Center Friedheim Award prize with William Kraft for Veils and Variations for Horn and Orchestra. [1] [2] [3]
The concerto has a duration of roughly minutes and is composed in three movements:
Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times called it a "visionary work" and wrote, "The score calls, crazily, for an orchestra of 48 strings. The concerto begins with an inexorable Prologue, which is followed by a subdued Psalm, almost Hebraic in its mysterious solemnity, and a fractured and exuberant Rondo." [4] Lesley Valdes of The Philadelphia Inquirer was more critical of the work, however, remarking, "In the Concerto for Cello, Piano and Strings, Shapey has crafted a dense, lurching, argumentative piece whose motives mysteriously soften in its slow movement to form a psalm of some beauty—although its beauty seems self-conscious because atmospherically it emphatically suggests the woodland scene from Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges ." [3]
The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
A string orchestra is an orchestra consisting solely of a string section made up of the bowed strings used in Western Classical music. The instruments of such an orchestra are most often the following: the violin, which is divided into first and second violin players, the viola, the cello, and usually, but not always, the double bass.
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
Charles Peter Wuorinen was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He also performed as a pianist and conductor. Wuorinen composed more than 270 works: orchestral music, chamber music, solo instrumental and vocal works, and operas, such as Brokeback Mountain. His work was termed serialist but he came to disparage that idea as meaningless. Time's Encomium, his only purely electronic piece, received the Pulitzer Prize. Wuorinen taught at several institutions, including Columbia University, Rutgers University and the Manhattan School of Music.
Stanislaw Pawel Stefan Jan Sebastian Skrowaczewski was a Polish-American classical conductor and composer.
Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.
Richard Wernick is an American composer. He is best known for his chamber and vocal works. His composition Visions of Terror and Wonder won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
William Quincy Porter was an American composer and teacher of classical music.
Joseph Clyde Schwantner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, educator and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2002. He was awarded the 1970 Charles Ives Prize.
Joel Krosnick is an American cellist who has performed as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician throughout the world for over 40 years. As a member of the Juilliard String Quartet from 1974 to 2016, he performed the great quartet literature throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
Ralph Shapey was an American composer and conductor.
Christopher Chapman Rouse III was an American composer. Though he wrote for various ensembles, Rouse is primarily known for his orchestral compositions, including a Requiem, a dozen concertos, and six symphonies. His work received numerous accolades, including the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He also served as the composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic from 2012 to 2015.
Yehudi Wyner is an American composer, pianist, conductor and music educator.
Wayne Peterson was an American composer, pianist, and educator. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark in 1992, when its board overturned the jury's unanimous selection of Concerto Fantastique by Ralph Shapey.
The Symphony is a symphony for orchestra by the Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran. The work was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Riccardo Muti in 1987 and was given its world premiere on October 19, 1990. The piece was awarded the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music and took the first place Kennedy Center Friedheim Award that same year. It was composed in a primarily atonal style.
The Concerto for Orchestra is an orchestral composition by the Polish-American composer Stanisław Skrowaczewski. Though originally composed in 1983 and premiered in the mid-1980s, Skrowaczewski later reworked the composition. It was first performed in its revised form on November 19, 1998, in Philadelphia by the orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music. The revised piece was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Concerto Fantastique is an orchestral composition in four movements by the American composer Ralph Shapey. The work was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who first performed the work under the composer on November 21, 1991. It was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Marcel Chyrzyński is a Polish composer. He has been described as "a polystylist with an enormous sense of humour, and a lover of rhythm and jazz improvisation". Chyrzyński's works have been performed throughout Europe, as well as in South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the USA and Canada.