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Neil Harris Galanter - pianist

concert artist, musician, pedagogue, clinician, educator, lecturer, master classes, seminars

VIDEO

American Premiere
Marcel Poot Piano Concerto
Neil Galanter, pianist with Los Angeles Valley Orchestra
Robert Chauls, conductor

This past fall, I gave the American Premiere of an unusual and fairly unknown Piano Concerto of the Belgian composer: Marcel Poot (1901-1988). His music is primarily known by wind and brass players, although he has written some very lovely string and piano music as well.

I have been involved with the unearthing of his piano music for a few years now and am working on the world premiere of a CD of some of his piano music.

The piano concerto (1959) is equally interesting and was written as a test piece for the 1960 Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition in Brussel.

Here is a video from the first movement of the concerto from the Oct. 13, 2007 performance featuring me as soloist with the Los Angeles Valley Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Chauls.

You can view the rest of the movements if you like directly at my my own YOU TUBE video site

I have written a short program note about the concerto which I think is quite pithy and explores the overall ideas in the concerto:

The Belgian composer Marcel Poot was born in Vilvoorde, in the Dutch (Flemish) section of Belgium near Brussels on 7 May 1901. Although he was Flemish, he worked equally in both the Flemish and Walloon sectors of Belgian Music Society and spoke both French and Dutch fluently in his career as one of the main Belgian composers of the 20^th century.

The Flemish are the Dutch speaking majority of the population of Belgium which encompasses the north and west sections of Belgium. The Walloons (Francophones) and the Germans make up the other two groups of population in this tiny but beautifully diverse country.

This piano concerto was written in 1959 and then later used as a required concerto at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels of which Poot was the chairman of the Jury. It has rarely been played, even in Europe. It is in three standard movements, very symmetric and each movement being about equal time. The first movement’s opens with a strident first theme that recalls the steeliness of Prokofiev which eventually leads to a more contrapuntal Hindemithian yet lush French second theme.

The second movement is a large and lugubrious piece of rich chamber music with an eerie opening melody that grows little by little into a rather large piano and orchestral climax eventually circling back to the opening theme.

The last movement is rondo like in character with dynamic and colourful orchestration. It has very intense rhythmic drive beginning with the striking opening material from the winds leading into the piano’s biting first theme constantly alternating between duples and triples. The movement gives almost all players a chance to show the brilliance of their instruments shared between the piano and orchestra.

-------Neil Harris Galanter