alexander-comitas-violin-concerto-nr.-ii
Here is a video with better sounds: https://youtu.be/gJ7zZ76ED8A
It had for a long time been a deep wish of mine to compose a violin concerto according to how Thomas Mann describes Adrian Leverkühn's concerto in his novel 'Doktor Faustus'. Eventually, Steven Hond, a friend of mine and at the time director of a large printing company, enabled me to compose the piece; which I did between 1994 and 2001, whenever I had some 'spare time'..
Unfortunately, the piece hasn't been performed, so far. This electronic sounds rendering doesn't sound very flattering, of course. Listening to my first violin concerto may help imagining what the music posted here will sound like in reality. Here are the links:
Movement I, beginning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtbOv78yA6c
Movement I, continuation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mAMmggLsg0
Movement II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT0fM80EP4I
Movement III: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4JFJDJ6O7U
Movement IV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB5Lc8mWdx4
A quotation from the novel, from Chapter XXXVII (translation: H.T. Lowe-Porter):
'My readers are aware that Adrian in the end complied with Rudi Schwerdtfeger's long-cherished and expressed desire, and wrote for him a violin concerto of his own. He dedicated to Rudi personally the brilliant composition, so extraordinarily suited to a violin technique, and even accompanied him to Vienna for the first performance. (...) I said that it falls somewhat out of the frame of Leverkühn's ruthlessly radical and uncompromising work as a whole. (...)
There is one strange thing about the piece: cast in three movements, it has no key-signature, but, if I may so express myself, three tonalities are built into it: B-flat major, C major, and D major, of which, as a musician can see, the D major forms a sort of secondary dominant, the B-flat major a subdominant, while the C major keeps the strict middle. Now between these keys the work plays most ingeniously, so that for most of the time none of them clearly comes into force but is only indicated by its proportional share in the general sound-complex. (...) In the first movement, inscribed "andante amoroso," of a dulcet tenderness bordering on mockery, there is a leading chord which to my ear has something French about it: c, g, e, b-flat, d, f-sharp, a, a harmony which, with the high f of the violin above it, contains, as one sees, the tonic chords of those three main keys. Here one has, so to speak, the soul of the work, also one has in it the soul of the main theme of this movement, which is taken up again in the third, a gay series of variations. In its way it is a wonderful stroke of melodic invention, a rich, intoxicating cantilena of great breadth, which decidedly has something showy about it, and also
...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i62-9BWkh-w
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Created
1 year ago
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video/mp4
English