American Piano Concertos

George Gershwin wrote his Concerto in F in 1925, in the middle of the decade in which American music began to assert itself as American. The work is infused with the tunefulness of the popular songs Gershwin produced in such profusion. The concerto is here offered in the company of Aaron Copland's 1926 Concerto, in which the blend of blues and modernism proved too radical a development for early audiences and critics. The high levels of dissonance in Samuel Barber's better-received 1962 concerto are softened by the sheer excitement of the virtuosic display and the composer's characteristic underlying romanticism. Xiayin Wang and Peter Oundjian approach all three with a heart-on-sleeve grandeur that rather delides the stylistic distinctions between them. url.ie/f1f2