Steven,
I hope you won't be upset in saying that I found this piece a little...hm...empty. Mostly smoke and little fire. That said though, it was a lot of fun to listen to. Some really nice things I liked were around 1:49 how the triplet, motif, almost, was transfered from piano to strings, and then combined with the previous melody in the woodwinds. Smooth move
. Your harmonic writing is very very good and your movement and modulation is also well written. However, most of your development is really just flashy chords and arpeggios and some romantic chromaticism, all very cliche and uninteresting writing. The pizzicato strings around 4 minutes was a nice change, but you fell right back into that previous writing style. I hoped that you would do something a little different with the beautiful melodies that were presented to us around the 4 minute mark, but instead you merely fancied it up instead of really taking off with it. Development of thematic material and musical phrases is some of the time effective with "fancying up" as you have done continually, but it really needs to change directions. A piece of music is really a trip: the development being the road and the thematic material a car. What you have done, at least in my opinion, is merely spent a lot of your time re-painting the car and spiffing it up instead of making it go anywhere. True, a lot of the piano effects were cool, and your orchestration wasn't bad at all, I happened to enjoy the dialogue and equality of the piano and orchestra (I try to do that in the piano concerti I write...or used to write rather). But the things like 8:40-9:00 are the rather pointless "smoke" that I'm talking about, along with most of your development. When you think you're changing direction, you're really doing nothing more than giving us a new theme, and then "re-painting" that one too and making it all flashy. You do return to your previous themes, but never in a truly different manner, simply a more severe one. I realize my commentary is rather one-tracked, but I feel like thats the most giant issue of your piece. The themes themselves I must say were quite nice. Very melodic, easy to walk away humming (thats really the idea). Catchy, but not obscene. Simple, but not boring or moronic. Again, the use of piano and orchestra together and separately was nice, I just think you could really "take off" with the music next time, instead of putting it in different pairs of clothing =].
Best of luck with future compositions, good job, and please keep writing!
Nicola
