Second Piano Concerto (for Amplified Piano and Orchestra)

Instrumentation

pf solo(amp),3333 4331 t,p(6),pf,str

Year

1974

Duration

25:20

Composed

10/7/1973 - 5/23/1974

Commission

Composed under a grant from the National Endowment for the Art, for the New York Philharmonic

"Brassy, percussive, peppery, mercurial in its tempos, muscular and insistently powerful." Newsweek "Effective and grabbing.  The mood is spunky and muscular ... In sections and in large ensemble, the orchestra continually reacts to and answers the all-over-the-place piano lines, until the players converge on a climactic passage that remembers Bartok.  Wuorinen directs his music toward this high point, but, along the way, he takes care to guide the listener, by making ingenious use of dynamics, textures and tempo shifts," Chicago Daily News "Powerful and complex ideas ... The surface sheen of sound is often impressive, particularly in the carefully scaled climaxes where the planes and levels of interacting rhythms and pitch levels mesh powerfully." Chicago Tribune