Concerto corale for Piano and Orchestra

Academician Davorin Kempf (1947), composer, musicologist and music pedagogue, at the Academy of Music in Zagreb he graduated piano (S. Radić) in 1971, conducting (I. Gjadrov) in 1972, and composition (S. Šulek) in 1973. As a grantee of the German Academic Exchange Service he continued his studies in composition at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart (M. Kelemen, E. Karkoschka) during the 1975-76 academic year, and at the Musikhochschule Köln (M. Kagel, J. Blume, H. – U. Humpert) during the 1976-77 academic year. As a Fulbright grantee he completed graduate study in composition at the University of Iowa U.S.A. (D. Martin Jenni, K. Gaburo) in 1990, receiving a Master of Arts (Music) degree. In 1994 and 1997 he carried out his short-term studies/researches as a grantee of the German Academic Exchange Service at Technische Universität Berlin, Elektronisches Studio (F. Hein). He earned his Ph.D. degree at Freie Universität Berlin, Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften (A. Riethmüller) in 2006. „Concerto corale for piano and orchestra was commissioned by the Zagreb Philharmonic and was finished in January 2013. The title of the work is related to the fact that in my compositional synthesis I have incorporated, and in different ways varied, two main motifs from the beginning of the Bach chorale Es ist genug. The first, characterized by three ascending whole-tone shifts within a tritone, is particularly important in the sense of harmonic-tonality. The single-movement form of my first piano concerto is composed freely. It contains three piano cadenzas and the musical language combines different compositional systems, from an expanded tonality to bi- and polytonality and occasional departures into cluster structures. The piano part is virtuosic and it represents a kind of hommage to the piano as the solo instrument par excellence of the epoch of romanticism. While composing the work I had in my mind the pianist Mia Elezović with whom I have been collaborating for quite a long time, for she has particular affinities with both classical and contemporary music. In 2014, I received the Boris Papandopulo Award of the Croatian Society of Composers for my composition Concerto corale.“ (Davorin Kempf)