Rain 1932

Premiered in 1932, Feinberg's First Piano Concerto was not warmly received and it is no wonder why. This is not happy music nor is it particularly pleasing to listen to, compared to the buoyancy of Prokofiev or lyricism of Rachmaninov. Feinberg's 33-minute concerto is extremely dreary, and purely expressive of angst and conflict. Much of the orchestration is original, but some of it is harsh, namely the dissonant brass fortissimi.The concerto itself is conceived as a single movement …..

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Five hundred years ago, Spanish conquistadors searching for gold and new lands to settle stumbled on a group of independent city-states in Mesoamerica, a region extending for more than a thousand miles from the desert of northern Mexico to the rain forest of Central America. Sophisticated beyond the Spaniards’ wildest imaginings, these people were the Aztecs, the Maya, and related cultures that shared common traditions of religion, government, social organization, the arts, agriculture, engineering, and trade.