- Etruscan Concerto is a piece for piano and chamber orchestra in 3 movements.
- The concerto draws on the impressions left on her by the Etruscans, whose culture flourished over 2000 years ago in modern-day Tuscany.
- Each movement is headed by a quotation from D. H. Lawrence’s published travel writings, Etruscan Places.
- MOVEMENTS:
- Promenade
- “You cannot think of art, but only of life itself, as if this were the very life of the Etruscans dancing in their colored wraps with massive yet exuberant limbs, ruddy from the air, and the sea light, dancing and fluting along the olive trees out in the fresh day.”
- Meditation
- “There is a queer stillness and a curious peaceful repose about the Etruscan places…”
- Scherzo
- “There seems to have been in the Etruscan instinct a real desire to preserve the natural humor of life. And that is a task more worthy, and even more difficult than conquering the world.”
- A melody from this last movement was previously used in Glanville-Hicks’s Sinfonia da Pacifica, and would be used again in The Transposed Heads.
- Promenade
- Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote Etruscan Concerto in 1954 while living in New York. The work premiered two years later at the Metropolitan Museum.1
- The piece was written for pianist Carlo Bussoti.
Sources
- “Peggy Glanville-Hicks,” in accompanying booklet, Lou Harrison – Seven Pastorales performed by Keith Jarrett and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, MusicMasters 67089, 1992, compact disc.
Cut IDs
23669