Respighi Three of Six Piano Pieces.mp4

. This video is to a compilation of three
selections from from the album “Respighi:
Piano Music” with Russian pianist
Konstantin Scherbakov, the winner of the
first Rachmaninoff International Piano
Competition in 1983. In 1990, he played
in four recitals at the Chamber Music
Festival of Asolo, “The City of a Hundred
Horizons” (for its mountain settings).
The Asolo recitals launched his
international career.
This video contains
1.) 1904’s Notturno in G-Flat Major, No. 3,
2.) The playful Canone, and.
3.) The serenata Intermezzo with its lovely
and bits of filigree.
All six sections can be found at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=T19mqDSR5ws
Konstantin Scherbakov ‘s “large concert hall”
recording is eighteen minutes long.
The Italian composer, violinist, teacher,
and musicologist Ottorino Respighi’s operas,
ballets, orchestral suites, choral songs, and
piano and chamber music have a delightful
elegance.
In mathematics, elegance is directly
proportional to the number of independent
ideas you can see and inversely proportional
to the effort it takes to see them.
In Respighi’s transcriptions of works from
Italian composers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries and works of Rachmaninoff and
Bach and in his three Roman tone poems
(Fountains of Rome, 1916), Pines of Rome,
1924, and Roman Festivals, 1928, he uses
rich orchestral colors and an elegant
simplicity that, to me, is timeless. While
Respighi is known as master orchestrator
with vivid timbral* colors in his Roman
Trilogy and Ancient Airs and Dances and
The Birds, at the same time his piano
music like the Six Pieces for Piano used in
this little video are, of course because they
are just for the piano, not orchestrated,
but still they have vivid timbral colors.
Timbre sound or tone quality of notes
played on an instrument. Two instruments
can play the same at identical volumes and
still produce distinct musical timbres.
In Respighi’s six piano solos the tone
timbres are delightfully subtle. They feel
like those in Johannes Brahms Eight Piano
Pieces Opus 76. Though a little less busy.
Take a listen at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NZ3mZLSO0s
The pianistic textures, magical effects
perfect dynamic control, simple melodic
lines, and handling of multi-layered rolled
chords of Respighi define what elegant is.
In music, engineering, speaking, singing,
dance, drama, design, fashion, athletics,
programming and a ost of othe disciplines
in cluding mathematics, when the most
beauty is achieved with the least effort,
it is elegant. Very cool indeed!
Except for the three title slides for the
three sections, my paintings were painted
while listening to Respighi. They are all
my own originals.