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Music open thread: Timpani concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-04-14
It wasn’t on my bingo card that Donald Trump would cheapen the Kennedy Center Honors. But there’s certainly more he can do to cheapen things at Kennedy, like maybe reinstitute the Friedheim Award and give it to Ted Nugent or Kid Rock.
That would certainly cheapen that award. The Friedheim Awards are given for accomplishments in orchestral and chamber music. But Trump is probably not someone who cares about award criteria, since obviously he doesn’t give a damn about court rulings, laws, regulatory rules, guidelines or norms.
But there are a few factors that would keep Trump from giving the Friedheim Award to someone who doesn’t deserve it and should never have even been considered. For one thing, the award hasn’t been given in thirty years. Also, it came with a cash prize that is no longer funded (hence why the award was discontinued).
One repeat winner was William Kraft, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. David Schwartz and Eve McPherson wrote up his biography for Music Academy Online.
William Kraft was born in Chicago, Illinois to recently arrived Ukrainian immigrants. Kraft’s father, Louis Albert Kashereffsky immigrated to Chicago at the age of eleven and went on to become a successful businessman. Louis, who Anglicized [sic] his surname to Kraft, originally spelling it “Krefft,” was an enterprising boy who became the assistant manager of a grocery store at the age of seventeen and before long owned his own grocery store. In 1915 Louis married Florence Rogalsky, who had immigrated at sixteen from the Ukraine.
They had three children and moved to San Diego. The parents enrolled their children in music lessons, and little William regarded his piano lessons more as an obligation to his parents than anything else. He was much more interested in baseball before he became interested in percussion instruments.
At the time William Kraft was first nominated for the Friedheim, he had been principal timpanist at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he learned the craft of timpani playing in great part from Saul Goodman, principal timpanist of the New York Philharmonic.
Now Kraft is perhaps best known for his Timpani Concerto No. 1 of 1983, which won him second place in the Friedheim Awards the following year. Unsurprisingly, however, it was a piece for solo horn and orchestra that tied him for first place with Ralph Shapey for the 1990 Friedheim Awards. At the time, Randye Hoder reported for the Los Angeles Times that
Kraft was presented with the award Oct. 28[, 1990] at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Kraft shares the first-place slot with Chicago composer Ralph Shapey. Each received $4,000. “Of course anyone would want to be the first-place winner,” Kraft, 67, said from his hillside Altadena home. ... During the ceremony, the Orchestra of the Mannes School of Music, conducted by Michael Charry, played the four chosen works for a small audience and for the three judges: Tim Page, a New York Times music critic, and conductors David Zinman and Werner Torkanowsky. Kraft’s composition, “Veils and Variations for Horn and Orchestra,” was nominated by Paul Polivnick, music director for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. [...] Kraft’s appearance at the Kennedy Friedheim competition marks the third time he has been nominated. In 1986 his “Timpani Concerto” took second prize, and in 1987 he was a semifinalist for his string quartet “Weavings.” “It’s been wonderful,” Kraft said of snaring first place at last. “I’ve never had so many congratulatory greetings.”
I wasn’t thinking of the Veils and Variations at all when I started the open thread about horn concertos, had never even listened to the piece before. But I was aware of his Timpani Concerto No. 1. The very first thing I wrote in the draft for this article was “Aho, Kraft,” referring to Kalevi Aho and William Kraft. Aho is a Finnish composer who, like Kraft, wrote a timpani concerto, but I just haven’t found Aho’s Timpani Concerto as compelling as either his Contrabassoon Concerto or his Tuba Concerto.
For this performance of Kraft’s Timpani Concerto No. 1, Ramón Granda is the timpani soloist, I take it Joshua Dos Santos is the conductor of the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela.
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I wasn’t quite sure about this concerto by Marcus Paus. The way it begins seemed rather bland, but I like how it ends. So I figure I might as well include it.
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Timpanist Paul Philbert hasn’t posted much on YouTube. Here he is playing excerpts from Der Wald by Siegfried Matthus. Philbert is one of only two black male timpanists I’m aware of, and only one of three or four black timpanists generally that I know of.
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Composers have been writing timpani concerti since well before the 20th Century. In this performance of Georg Druschetzky’s Partita in C major, the placement of the soloist relative to the conductor and the string instruments strikes me as rather odd, but it does come closer to where the timpani are usually placed.
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Playing timpani is a lot more difficult than even some professional musicians are aware of. I have played timpani precisely once in my life, and thankfully it was only in a rehearsal. I happened to be walking near a rehearsal room when the conductor called out to me to come in a fill in on timpani.
In hindsight, he would have never called on me to fill in on, for example, viola, or really any other instrument. If the conductor had any reason to think I was good at any instrument, it would not have been a percussion instrument. A colleague of the conductor agreed that it was wrong for the conductor to expect some random guy walking around to fill in on timpani.
It was for a piece by the wife of one of the professors. The dynamics ranged from pianississimo to mezzo-piano, if I recall correctly. The first note I played caused the conductor to look at me like I had uttered some profanity. I thought maybe it was that I played it too loud. Or that I played at the wrong time, having misunderstood the conductor’s cues.
In hindsight it occurs to me now that it could have been because I played the wrong pitches. I assumed the timpani were tuned per the composer’s instructions. But if the orchestra’s usual timpanist was absent, there probably was no one to tune the timpani.
Even if it was the same piece that was last played on those drums, there was just no guarantee that they would have still been tuned correctly however little time had elapsed since the previous rehearsal. During the course of an orchestral performance, you might see the timpanist putting his ear very close to the instrument, playing a very soft note to ensure the pitch is correct for the upcoming notes.
Before Beethoven, composers could rely on two timpani, if they were available at all. One of them would be tuned to the tonic note (scale degree 1) and the other to the dominant (scale degree 5). For example, for a symphony in C major, the higher (smaller) drum would be tuned to the C an octave below middle C, and the lower (larger) drum would be tuned to the G a fourth below that C.
The “Jena” Symphony by Friedrich Witt, once thought to be an early work by Beethoven, is a good example of this.
Beethoven expected more timpani notes than that, especially in his later works (e.g., his Ninth Symphony), and now it’s standard for an orchestral timpanist to play on four drums, including a smaller one that can play middle C and a few notes below and above that.
Anton Bruckner doesn’t get enough credit for the cleverness of his timpani writing. In the scherzos of his symphonies, he typically uses the timpani to play a rhythmic bridge at structurally significant points (in recordings this typically gets lost and it sounds like a general pause).
Though Robert Simpson does give Bruckner credit for something that happens in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6 in A major. At the end of the development of the opening Majestoso, a lot of the orchestral instruments are playing A-flats, but the timpani are silent. But then suddenly, those instruments play G-sharps and that’s when the timpani come back in, ushering in the recapitulation.
As the “Jena” Symphony excerpt shows, timpanists must count lots of rests. In Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, the timpanist is silent for something like twenty minutes at the beginning. Bruckner gives the timpanist some brief but very powerful moments in his Eighth Symphony. I had hoped Philbert would have included some Bruckner excerpts in his assortment of “timpanic treats,” but alas, he did not.
This is the piece that I must absolutely include in this open thread: the Concerto-Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra by Phillip Glass.
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After the concerto in this other performance, there’s a fun encore in which timpanist David Hernandez switches over to a drum set.
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This concerto is also available in an arrangement for wind band.
The main open thread question: What is your favorite music with solos for timpani?
Side question: Have I forgotten anything significant in percussion for these open threads or should I move on to keyboard instruments like the piano?
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