Francis Shaw: Piano Concertos

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The Lyrita label has been known in the mid-2010s for reissues of radio broadcasts from the 1960s and 1970s, featuring largely forgotten British music of the middle 20th century. This release of music by Francis Shaw is not part of that series; it offers a pair of piano concertos by Shaw, one written in 2013 and the other revised in that year. Yet, sonics aside, it might easily have been part of the reissue series, for this is retrospective music. Shaw has been best known as a composer of film music, but that idiom plays hardly any role in the Piano Concerto No. 1, originally written in 1988. Instead, the concerto refers back to the Piano Concerto in G major of Ravel with its dreamy central movement designated as a blues and its jazzy accents elsewhere. The music is more dissonant than Ravel, and there are hints of Ravel's English followers and of a rhythmic tension that seems to be Shaw's own, but it's essentially music of a century ago. More interesting is the Piano Concerto No. 2, in which Shaw the film composer is more audible, but his modern training is also given room to develop. The locus classicus for this work is Prokofiev, and both the tonal and the rhythmic aspects of his music are pushed toward new limits. Sample the substantial opening movement for music that develops in the manner of exploring the experiences of an individual protagonist, but also is tightly knitted together and has a good deal of rhythmic dynamism. Individual passages here might have been written by other composers, but the whole could not have been. Shaw himself conducts the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Martin Jones an ideal foil in the high-energy passages, and these performances may be taken as definitive. Fine sound from a Slovak Radio studio in Bratislava is a plus.
© TiVo