Colin Horsley (piano)
BBC Northern Orchestra
Conductor, Charles Groves
Boris Blacher , one of the leading figures in German music today, was born in China in 1903 of Russian-German parents, and was nineteen when he went to Jive in Germany. He has written a symphony, a piano concerto, several operas and ballets, and an oratorio based on Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. His partita for string orchestra and percussion was completed in 1945. Lennox Berkeley's Piano Concerto was written for Colin Horsley, who played it first at a Promenade Concert in August 1948. The. composer has said that in the spirit of the music and the shape of the movements the work has more affinity with Mozart than with the concerto-writers of the nineteenth century, though of course there is no kinship with the Mozarfian idiom. Thematic material and decoration are shared more or less equally between soloist and orchestra. There are three movements: Allego moderato, Andante, and Vivace. Harold Rutland