Edward Alexander MacDowell (December 18, 1860 - January 23, 1908) was an American composer and pianist of the Romantic period. He was best known for his second piano concerto and his piano suites Woodland Sketches, Sea Pieces and New England Idylls. Woodland Sketches includes his most popular short piece, "To a Wild Rose". In 1904 he was one of the first seven Americans honored by membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 23 (1885)
Dedication: Teresa Carreño (1853-1917)
1. Larghetto calmato (0:00)
2. Presto giocoso (13:36)
3. Largo - Molto allegro (18:19)
Naxos recording
Stephen Prutsman, piano and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland conducted by Arthur Fagen
Description by Roger Dettmer [-]
MacDowell composed this work in 1884 and 1885, and played the first performance with Theodore Thomas and his eponymous orchestra in Chickering Hall, New York City, on March 5, 1889. The accompaniment is scored for two each of winds and trumpets, four horns, three trombones, timpani, and strings. In American Music since 1910, Virgil Thomson cited MacDowell as "our nearest to a great composer before [Charles] Ives. His short works for piano still speak to us." Let us add that the Second Piano Concerto remains among the most popular of way too few staples in the concerto genre by American composers. Only Gershwin's Concerto in F, composed 40 years after, enjoys a comparable status in the repertory, followed distantly by Aaron Copland's single endeavor (1926), and Samuel Barber's lone essay.
MacDowell was 15 when his mother took him abroad to study -- at the Paris Conservatoire for three years (where Debussy was a fellow student), then in Stuttgart and Frankfurt for three years (where Joseph Raff was his composition professor and Carl Heymann his piano pedagogue). In 1881 the Darmstadt Conservatory made MacDowell its chief piano instructor. In 1882 he took his First Piano Concerto to Liszt, who advised him to concentrate on composition, and persuaded the Leipzig firm of Breitkopf & Härtel to publish Modern Suites Nos. 1 and 2, thereby establishing MacDowell here and abroad as the first notable "American" composer.
He returned briefly to the U.S. in 1884, to marry, then returned to Germany. On his honeymoon he sketched what became the scherzo in this concerto, which was completed at Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. Grieg (to whom MacDowell dedicated one of his four piano sonatas) is reflexively cited along with Liszt as a major influence on MacDowell's music. But the Second Piano Concerto, not to deny its own voice or expertise, is plainly in the tradition of Saint-Saëns' Second, especially the scherzo movement. MacDowell absorbed more during his unhappy years at Paris than he may consciously have realized.