Fingerstyle Leonard Hall

Copland began his Music for the Theatre in May 1925 in New York City, but the bulk of the composition was written at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during the summer. Having been impressed with Copland's earlier Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924), conductor Sergey Koussevitzky (1874-1951) urged the League of Composers to commission an orchestral piece from Copland, to be performed the following season.

Here are three 20th-century violin concertos written within a 30-year period in three totally different styles, played by a soloist equally at home in all of them. Bernstein's Serenade, the earliest and most accessible work, takes its inspiration from Plato's Symposium; its five movements, musical portraits of the banquet's guests, represent different aspects of love as well as running the gamut of Bernstein's contrasting compositional styles. Rorem's concerto sounds wonderful. Its six movements have titles corresponding to their forms or moods; their character ranges from fast, brilliant, explosive to slow, passionate, melodious. Philip Glass's concerto, despite its conventional three movements and tonal, consonant harmonies, is the most elusive. Written in the "minimalist" style, which for most ordinary listeners is an acquired taste, it is based on repetition of small running figures both for orchestra and soloist, occasionally interrupted by long, high, singing lines in the violin against or above the orchestra's pulsation.

This version of Handel's 'Messiah' could quite possibly be feasible today only as a Bernstein reissue. The quest for authenticity has overtaken the performance and recording of early music, and even a conductor recording 'Messiah' without attempting a historically-informed style of performance wouldn't dare introduce the level of revision that Bernstein did for this 1956 recording and the Carnegie Hall performances which preceded it.

Fingerstyle with The Beatles
9 sections • 415 lectures • 11h 39m total length
2022-10 | e-Learning | English | MP4, PDF | 14.81 GB

Learn to Fingerstyle Guitar with The Beatles Songs.