Special offer. Charles Wuorinen: Eighth Symphony & Fourth Piano Concerto
Peter Serkin
Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine
Wuorinen’s rugged atonality is challenging, yet the more I listen to these splendid scores, the more I’m won over by the richness of the music.
Special offer. Charles Wuorinen: Eighth Symphony & Fourth Piano Concerto
Peter Serkin
Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine
Purchase product
Wuorinen’s rugged atonality is challenging, yet the more I listen to these splendid scores, the more I’m won over by the richness of the music.
About
In 2004, James Levine became music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Levine immediately began to commission major new works from leading American composers, including the two works recorded here. Wuorinen's Fourth Piano Concerto, written for the BSO, James Levine, and longtime Wuorinen collaborator Peter Serkin, was one of the first of the BSO commissions Levine conducted with the orchestra, in 2005. This was followed two years later by the Eighth Symphony (Theologoumena), a BSO 125th anniversary commission premiered under Levine's direction in 2007. These spectacular recordings document the premiere performances of both of these works.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
25th November 2016
Wuorinen’s rugged atonality is challenging, yet the more I listen to these splendid scores, the more I’m won over by the richness of the music.
23rd October 2016
Wuorinen is the daunting doyen of American serialist composers: prolific, uncompromising, intellectual...the Eighth Symphony is marked by explosive virtuosity, while the Fourth Piano Concerto, written for Serkin, ventures in its thorny fashion a lyric solo line.
27th October 2016
Serkin’s playing is consummately authoritative.
December 2016
The symphony is marked by explosive virtuosity, the concerto by thorny lyricism.
Classical Ear January 2017
[the Eighth Symphony] teems with an often combustible energy in its quest to find accommodation between ancient classical belief systems and Christian monotheism. Wuorinen is helped enormously by the strident advocacy of the Boston players under his long-time champion James Levine…[the Fourth Piano Concerto] displays its kinship with the symphony in music that is, by turns, concrete-hard and severe and magically poetic with an edge of fantasy
