Broadway-Lafayette – Ravel Piano Concerto in G, Philip Lasser ‘The Circle and the Child’, Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue—Simone Dinnerstein, piano; MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony/Kristjan Järvi (Sony 503245)
It’s a celebration of a time-honored transatlantic link: Broadway’s America represented by George Gershwin and Lafayette’s France by Maurice Ravel. In the middle is Philip Lasser, who happens to have a French mother and American father. He wrote his concerto The Circle and the Child especially for Simone Dinnerstein in 2012. It’s an amalgam of both French and American sound worlds while based on a German chorale Ihr Gestirn’, Ihr hohlen Lüfte (You stars in heaven, you vaulted sky) by Johann Sebastian Bach. Says Mr. Lasser: “One hears the chorale as an intimate confession from the piano in dialogue with itself and its orchestral double through the fears and loves of a child.”
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