Piano Concerto No. 3 (Balada)

Last updated May 02, 2019

The Piano Concerto No. 3 is a piano concerto by the Catalan composer Leonardo Balada. It was finished in 1999 and the complete work premiered on 12 February 2000 by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Rosa Torres-Pardo as soloist. This concerto is well known for its wealth of folk elements.

A piano concerto is a type of concerto, a solo composition in the Classical music genre which is composed for a piano player, which is typically accompanied by an orchestra or other large ensemble. Piano concertos are typically virtuoso showpieces which require an advanced level of technique on the instrument, including melodic lines interspersed with rapid scales, arpeggios, chords, complex contrapuntal parts and other challenging material. When piano concertos are performed by a professional concert pianist, a large grand piano is almost always used, as the grand piano has a fuller tone and more projection than an upright piano. Piano concertos are typically written out in music notation, including sheet music for the pianist, orchestra parts for the orchestra members, and a full score for the conductor, who leads the orchestra in the accompaniment of the soloist.

Catalonia is an autonomous community in Spain on the northeastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, designated as a nationality by its Statute of Autonomy. Catalonia consists of four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. The capital and largest city is Barcelona, the second-most populated municipality in Spain and the core of the sixth most populous urban area in the European Union. It comprises most of the territory of the former Principality of Catalonia. It is bordered by France (Occitanie) and Andorra to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the east, and the Spanish autonomous communities of Aragon to the west and Valencia to the south. The official languages are Catalan, Spanish, and the Aranese dialect of Occitan.

Leonardo Balada Ibáñez is a Spanish American classical composer, who is noted for his operas and orchestral works. After studying piano at the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu in Barcelona, Balada emigrated to the United States in 1956 to study at the New York College of Music on scholarship. He left that institution for the Juilliard School in New York, from which he graduated in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Alexandre Tansman and Aaron Copland, and conducting with Igor Markevitch. In 1981, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Since 1970 he has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Structure

This concerto is divided into three untitled movements. In the first movement, the composer uses elements from folk music of Spain, recreating a pasodoble, with a timbral arrangement that tries to imitate a street organ. The second movement evokes melodic textures that are similar to the music of Al-Andalus. In the third movement, the composer writes a jota aragonesa, a typical music genre from Aragon, in which Balada maintains the melodic structures from the first movement.^[1]

Spain, officially the Kingdom of Spain, is a country mostly located in Europe. Its continental European territory is situated on the Iberian Peninsula. Its territory also includes two archipelagoes: the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, and the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. The African enclaves of Ceuta, Melilla, and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera make Spain the only European country to have a physical border with an African country (Morocco). Several small islands in the Alboran Sea are also part of Spanish territory. The country's mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with Gibraltar; to the north and northeast by France, Andorra, and the Bay of Biscay; and to the west and northwest by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean.

Pasodoble is a Spanish military march, and also a modern dance that emulates the movements of a bullfight.

A street organ played by an organ grinder is an automatic mechanical pneumatic organ designed to be mobile enough to play its music in the street. The two most commonly seen types are the smaller German and the larger Dutch street organ.

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References

↑ "Leonardo Balada talks about his recording in Naxos.com". Leonardo Balada. Retrieved July 12, 2011.

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[1] "Leonardo Balada talks about his recording in Naxos.com". Leonardo Balada. Retrieved July 12, 2011.