MOSZKOWSKI : Piano Concerto In A Minor Op 17 : PADEREWSKI : Piano Concerto In E Major Op 59 (Piers Lane · BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra · Jerzy Maksymiuk) (1991) Serie The Romantic Piano Concerto – 1 | FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Of the myriad piano concertos composed in the second half of the nineteenth century all but a handful are forgotten. The survivors are played with a regularity that borders on the monotonous—the ubiquitous Tchaikovsky No 1, the Grieg, Saint-Saëns’s Second (in G minor), the two by Brahms and, really, that is just about all there is on offer. Pianists, promoters and record companies play it safe and opt for the familiar. Even a masterpiece can become an unwelcome guest, especially when subjected to an unremarkable outing by yet another indifferent player, as happens so frequently today.

How refreshing, then, to have the dust brushed off two forgotten specimens of late nineteenth-century piano concertos and rendered clean and polished for inspection again. Refreshing and rewarding, for both are exactly the sort of pieces that make one wonder why we are forced to live off such a limited concerto diet. How is it that such appealing, well-crafted, imaginative works with their high spirits and luscious tunes could have vanished from the repertoire? Why is it that neither is played as frequently as, say, the Grieg Concerto? Or instead of it? What is it about them that has failed to put them in the classical pop charts? Listening to them afresh it is a teasing question to answer; the longer one ponders the matter the fewer become the justifiable, verifiable reasons why today’s audiences so rarely have the opportunity to enjoy works such as these two delightful crowd-pleasers. It is time for those who promote and play piano music to be more adventurous and imaginative in their programming before this particular corner of the repertoire dies a death from staleness and stultification.

‘After Chopin,’ wrote Paderewski, ‘Moritz Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique.’ The two pianist-composers had more than their art in common. Both were Poles (though Moszkowski was born in Breslau, then the capital of Silesia in Germany). Both were witty, cultivated men. Moszkowski’s most celebrated bon mot immortalised him—a riposte to the pompous pronouncement by Hans von Bülow, ‘Bach, Beethoven, Brahms: Tous les autres sont des crétins’ (‘All the others are idiots’), to which Moszkowski replied: ‘Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and your humble servant Moritz Moszkowski: Tous les autres sont des chrétiens!’ (‘All the others are christians!’). Paderewski’s most famous line, incidentally, though probably apocryphal, also concerned a play on words. When mistaken by a wealthy American hostess for a famous polo player, Paderewski is supposed to have replied, ‘No,he is a rich soul who plays polo—I am a poor Pole who plays solo.’

Moszkowski also helped Paderewski in seeing that some of the younger man’s work was published. But there similarities end. As far as their lives and careers went, Moszkowski’s beginning mirrored Paderewski’s end; Padereski’s beginning mirrored Moszkowski’s end.

Born in 1854 into a wealthy family, Moritz Moszkowski began music studies at an early age in Dresden, continued at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and then went on to Theodor Kullak, a pupil of Czerny, at the Neue Akademie der Tonkunst. (Among his fellow students there were the brothers Philip and Xaver Scharwenka who remained friends throughout his life.) He made his debut as a concert pianist in Berlin when he was nineteen and for the next 24 years gave recitals all over Europe, taught at Kullak’s Academy, conducted and composed. When he settled in Paris at the age of 43 he was a famous and well-respected musician. He was also very wealthy for, early on in his career, he had written two pieces of music which were among the most popular piano compositions of the last century. In every piano stool in the land you could find a copy of his Serenade, Op 15 No 1, and the Spanish Dances, Op 12, for piano duet.

He and his wife (the sister of Cécile Chaminade) were a popular couple, well-connected and generous in their help of other musicians. Moszkowski, like Grieg and Chopin, was more at home with the piano than anything else, though he achieved some success in London, at least, as a composer of large-scale symphonic works—Joan of Arc, for example (almost certainly an influence on Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration), three Suites for Orchestra, incidental music to Don Juan and Faust, an opera Boabdil (1892) and ballet Laurin (1896). There is also the splendid, romantic Violin Concerto, Op 30—a show-stopper that, curiously, has never found a champion.

But of all the melodious and elegant works of Moritz Moszkowski it is his Piano Concerto in E, Op 59, that most strongly begs for revival. It is not a short work and it is not an easy work for the soloist, but its grateful pianistic writing, its memorable themes and its sunny optimism make its present neglect quite incomprehensible. No one could pretend that it is deep music, but if, as one writer put it, ‘it fails to stir the intellect, it sets the pulses tingling’. Were it to be given at a major music festival in place of the usual fare it would bring the house down; given a televised performance, it would re-establish itself as one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire— a status which it enjoyed for many years before the First World War, especially in Germany and the UK (the composer himself was the soloist in its British premiere at a Philharmonic Concert on 12 May 1898).

The Concerto is dedicated ‘à Monsieur Josef Casimir Hofmann’—a singular tribute to a 22-year-old—who had studied briefly with Moszkowski in his teens. It is one of the very few written in the key of E major. It was also virtually the last large-scale work that Moszkowski attempted. Ten years after its composition he was, at the age of 54, already a recluse, constantly ill. He had lost his wife and daughter, his son had been summoned to serve in the French army, and he was, as one friend described him, ‘no longer buoyed by ambition’. He sold all the copyrights of his music and invested the enormous capital in German, Polish and Russian bonds. With the advent of the First World War he lost everything and lingered on till 1925, too sick in body and mind to do anything, dying of stomach cancer in Paris, a pauper.

The musical world still looks down its nose at the mention of the name of Moritz Moszkowski. He is all-too-readily pigeon-holed by the derogatory label ‘polished salon music composer’. He was not an original, one is reminded; he added nothing new to musical language; he wrote nothing that others had not written better before him. But are these good enough reasons to ignore the facile, joyous, champagne-brilliance of Moszkowski’s music and help to dissuade all but a handful of imaginative pianists from tackling his entertaining Piano Concerto?

Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op 17, is chronologically the older of the two works, though written by the younger of the two composers. Paderewski, born in November 1860 in Kurylowka, Podolia (Russian-Poland), was a still virtually unknown 28-year-old when he composed his one Concerto. (His only other large scale work for piano and orchestra is the Fantaisie Polonaise, Op 19, written some five years later.) Though he had made his debut at the tender age of eleven, his career proper as a solo pianist did not take off until his mid-twenties after extensive studies with the great pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky. A spectacular recital in Paris in March 1888 and a further one in Vienna in November the same year were the starting points for a performing career that would make his name synonymous with the piano and lend it near-legendary status during his lifetime.

Before his lessons with Leschetizky, his musical life had been a penurious uncertainty for his early dreams of becoming a soloist were wedded to those of becoming a composer. He took courses in composition at the Warsaw Conservatory between 1875 and 1877 while simultaneously touring provincial Russian towns with the Polish violinist Cielewicz. In 1878 he joined the piano faculty in Warsaw, but left four years later to study composition with Friedrich Kiel in Berlin. Here he met Anton Rubinstein who, at that time, occupied the position in the piano world which Liszt had held (and which was to shortly become Paderewski’s). Rubinstein was of the opinion that Paderewski should take his compositional abilites more seriously and the younger man, with characteristic diligence and determination, set about doing just that. He studied orchestration with Heinrich Urban in Berlin and then, financed by the the celebrated Polish actress Modjeska, left for Vienna and his seminal tutelage with Leschetizky.

1888, the year of Paderewski’s Paris and Vienna debuts, was also the year of the composition of the Piano Concerto—the year when the two driving forces of his creative life emerged finally from the wilderness to meet in triumph. His state of mind at the time is etched into every bar of the concerto, revelling in exuberant pianism and fervent emotion.

Paderewski began its composition in his apartment in Vienna, after his triumphant recital in Paris. ‘I wrote it in a very short time. I scored it in ’89 in Paris,’ he recalled in his memoirs, published in 1939:

    When I finished [the] concerto, I was still lacking in experience. I had not even heard it performed—it was something I was longing for. I wanted to have the opinion then of a really great orchestral composer. I needed it. So without further thought I took my score and went directly to Saint-Saëns. [Saint-Saëns had been unfailingly kind to him on previous occasions, attending his concerts when he had played the French master’s Fourth Piano Concerto.] But I was rather timid … I realised on second thoughts that it was, perhaps, presumption on my part to go to him. Still I went to his house nevertheless. I was so anxious for his opinion. He opened the door himself. ‘Oh, Paderewski, it’s you. Come in,’ he said. ‘Come in. What do you want?’ I realised even before he spoke that he was in a great hurry and irritable, probably writing something as usual and not wanting to be interrupted. ‘What can I do for you? What do you want?’ I hesitated what to answer. I knew he was annoyed. I had come at the wrong moment … ‘I came to ask your opinion about my piano concerto,’ I said very timidly. ‘I ——.’ ‘My dear Paderewski,’ he cried, ‘I have not the time. I cannot talk to you today. I cannot.’ He took a few steps impatiently about the room. ‘Well, you are here so I suppose I must receive you. Let me hear your concerto. Will you play it for me?’ He took the score and read it as I played. He listened very attentively. At the Andante he stopped me, saying, ‘What a delightful Andante! Will you kindly repeat that?’ I repeated it. I began to feel encouraged. He was interested. Finally he said, ‘There is nothing to be changed. You may play it whenever you like. It will please the people. It’s quite ready. You needn’t be afraid of it, I assure you.’ So the interview turned out very happily after all, and he sent me off with high hopes and renewed courage. At that moment in my career, his assurance that the concerto was ready made me feel a certain faith in my work that I might not have had then.

Paderewski had wanted to play the premiere of the work himself but Madame Essipoff (a formidable pianist and Leschetizky’s wife at that moment) said, ‘as she had introduced some of his (Paderewski’s) compositions already in Vienna, she would like to do this concerto too.’ She had been studying it for several weeks. It was a request that Paderewski acceded to somewhat reluctantly but was, after all, ‘glad to have her do it, because I had not studied the concerto sufficiently for a great public performance.’

Thanks to the influence of Leschetizky, to whom Paderewski dedicated the work, the first performance was conducted by no less than Hans Richter, possibly the most influential European conductor of the day, and had ‘an immediate success’.

To re-apply the words of Sir Thomas Beecham (who, incidentally, was coached by Moszkowski in orchestration), these two Concertos have a ‘refinement and distinction that never fails to fall fragrantly on the ear, and offers to the musical amateur, who may feel at times that the evolution of his art is becoming a little too much for either his understanding or enjoyment, a soothing retreat where he may effectively rally his shattered forces.’ Hyperion
        
Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925)    
    
Piano Concerto in E major Op 59 [36'55]
        
Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941)    
    
Piano Concerto in A minor Op 17 [35'07]

Conductor – Jerzy Maksymiuk
Leader – Geoffrey Trabichoff
Orchestra – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Piano – Piers Lane

MEDTNER : Piano Concerto No 2 In C Minor • Piano Concerto No 3 In E Minor (Nikolai Demidenko · BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra · Jerzy Maksymiuk) (1992) Serie The Romantic Piano Concerto – 2 | FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, Nikolai Medtner, a Russian of distant German descent, studied under Pabst, Sapelnikov and Safonov at the Moscow Conservatoire, graduating in 1900 with the coveted Anton Rubinstein Prize. Admired as a pianist of particularly formidable attainment and inventive imagination, he held important teaching appointments at the Conservatoire (1909/10, 1914/21) before eventually leaving Russia for periods of domicile in Germany, the USA and Paris. In the winter of 1935/36 he settled in England, making his home in the Golders Green area of north London. Befriended by the Royal Philharmonic Society and made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, it was here that he died in November 1951, from a heart attack—leaving the world, his devoted wife was to write later, ‘in a serene and grateful spirit’. As a pianist, Medtner was much sought after. He toured Europe in 1901/02 and again in l921, returned to his homeland for a series of historic concerts in 1927 and visited North America twice, in 1924/25 and 1929/30. In l944 ill-health forced him to retire from the platform—but not from the recording studio: in his last years, under the patronage of Sir Jaya Chamaraja Wadiyar, the Maharajah of Mysore, he taped a number of his more important works for HMV.

As a composer, a recluse who shunned publicity and self-promotion, Medtner, a noted Beethovenian no less than an ardent post-Schumannite, in Glazunov’s opinion (Paris, 1934), ‘firm defender of the sacred laws of eternal art’, was a musician steeped in Teutonic Tradition: the critic Sabaneiev estimated him to be ‘the first real, actual Beethoven in Russia—one who did not imitate but continued the master’s work’. Among his own compatriots he was drawn to early Scriabin, but had a higher regard for Tchaikovsky and Borodin. Chopin and Liszt, too, were happy hunting grounds. Like Chopin, Medtner expressed himself almost exclusively through the medium of the piano. Like Chopin, he knew how to invest a miniature with large-scale tension, how to generate a grand design. No salon soufflé journalist, his concern always was with the massive—as three piano concertos, a piano quintet, three sonatas with violin and over a dozen of imposing dimension for piano, plus a fine heritage of songs (recorded in their time by both Slobodskaya and Schwarzkopf) impressively testify. For sheer originality, his famous Skazki or ‘Legends’ (‘Fairy Tales’)—mercurial, fantastical, Russianized narratives of the soul, suggestive yet curiously private—are unlike anything else in the repertoire.

‘By far the most interesting and striking personality in modern Russian music is that of Nicolas Medtner’, avowed Sorabji in Around Music (1932). ‘If only for his absolute independence and aloofness from the Stravinsky group and its satellites on the one hand, and his equally marked detachment from the orthodox academics grouped around Glazunov and the inheritors of the Tchaikovsky tradition on the other … like Sibelius, Medtner does not flout current fashions, he does not even deliberately ignore them, but so intent on going his own individual way is he that he is simply unconscious of their very existence. In a word, he has made for himself, by the sheer strength of his own personality, that impregnable inner shrine and retreat that only the finest spirits either dare or can inhabit.’ Among the most enigmatic figures of our century, Medtner was an apostle of conscience. He placed a premium on baroque polyphony, on classical structure, on a manner of thematic integration and cyclic metamorphosis romantic in legacy. He celebrated, he developed, he concentrated the sonata ideal. He was a resolute tonalist, a poetic melodist of the old guard.

‘Everything [Medtner] wrote’, Gerald Abraham remarks, ‘is perfectly fashioned, complete in every sense of the word … his music ‘wears’ extremely well … subjective lyrical emotion: that is the essence of Medtner’s art. He sometimes gives his pieces suggestive titles, but they are never programmatic in the usual sense of the word … titles are the merest hints to guide the listener’s fantasy.’ Ernest Newman believed that Medtner was ‘one of those composers who are classics in their lifetime. He does what every notable composer has done—takes the current language of music, impresses his own personality on it, extends its vocabulary, and modifies its grammar to suit his own ends, and then gets on with the simple business of saying what he thinks in the clearest terms possible … his music is not always easy to follow at a first hearing, but not because of any extravagance of thought or confusion of technique, it is simply because this music really does go on thinking from bar to bar, evolving logically from its premises. Perhaps the technical secret of its vitality is its rhythm … each work is an individual self-evolving organic unity.’ Another contemporary, the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, perceived that in Medtner we have an example of a musician attuned to the primordial. ‘Medtner’s music astonishes and delights’, he says, ‘not only by the wealth and breadth of its melodies that seem to be living and breathing, but also by their inexpressible primariness. This may lead to actual mistakes and illusions: you may fancy that you have heard this melody before … but where, when, from whom, in childhood, in a dream, in delirium? You will puzzle your head and strain your memory in vain: you have not heard it anywhere: in human ears it sounds for the first time … and yet it is as though you had long been waiting for it—waiting because you ‘knew’ it, not in sound, but in spirit. For the spiritual content of the melody is universal and primordial … it is as though age-long desires and strivings of our forebears were singing in us; or, as though the eternal melodies we had heard in heaven and preserved in this life as ‘strange and lovely yearnings’, were remembered at last and sung again—chaste and simple.’

At once Germanic, Frankish, Russian, a man defiantly resistant of labelling or bracketing, Medtner’s credo is expressed in unequivocal terms in his book The Muse and the Fashion (published in Paris in 1935, with the help of his friend Rachmaninov): ‘I do not believe in my dicta on music, but in music itself. I do not wish to communicate my thoughts on music, but my faith in music … the Theme is above all in intuition (in German ‘einfall’). It is acquired, not invented. The intuition of a theme constitutes a command. The fulfilment of this command is the principal task of the artist, and in the fulfilment of this task all the powers of the artist himself take part. The more faithful the artist has remained to the theme that appeared to him by intuition, the more artistic is this fulfilment and the more inspired his work … the theme is the most simple and accesible part of the work, it unifies it, and holds within itself the clue to all the subsequent complexity and variety of the work … the theme is not always, and not only, a melody … it is capable of turning into a continuous melody the most complex construction of form … melody, as our favourite and most beautiful form of the ‘theme’, should actually be viewed only as a form of the theme … form (the construction of a musical work) is harmony … form without contents is nothing but a dead scheme. Contents without form, raw material. Only contents plus form is equal to a work of art … time (tempo) is the plane of music, but this plane, in itself, is not rhythm … a neglect of rhythm makes musical form the prose, and not the poetry, of sound … song, poetry and dance are unthinkable without rhythm, which not only bring them into close relation, but often unites music, poetry and dance into one art, as it were … sonority (dynamics, colour, the quality of sounds) can never become a theme. While the other elements appeal to our spirit, soul, feeling, and thought, sonority in itself, being a duality of sound, appeals to our auditory sensation, to the taste of our ear, which in itself is capable merely of increasing, or weakening, our pleasure in the qualities of the object, but can in no way determine its substance or value … where thought and feeling confer with each other, you will find the artistic conscience. Inspiration comes, where thought is saturated in emotion, and emotion is imbued with sense …’

In Moscow Medtner studied piano at the Conservatoire. As a composer, though he had some lessons from Arensky and Taneyev, he was essentially self-taught: Taneyev used to like to say he was born with the knowledge of sonata-form within him—that was enough. In Richard Holt’s Medtner memorial symposium (1955), a book well-known in Russia, Ilyin (echoing the composer himself) suggests that he was in fact one who never actually invented anything: rather, he listened, he was the vessel through which music passed. His protagonist sonata themes, he argues, ‘stand in need of each other … they may intersect or destroy each other … they may comfort, purify, enlighten each other, and work together for common victory and reconciliation. They live in creative intercommunion …’ Discussing the elements of Medtner’s music, ‘all his modulations’, he says, ‘have the spiritual meaning of emotional ‘concession’, or of ‘stepping back in a dance’, or of comfort in sorrow, or of retreat into the shadow and darkness, into the world beyond; not one of his tonalities is accidental; his counterpoint expresses the spiritual consonance, dissonance and assimilation of themes … fugue is used by him to indicate that a given theme has been accepted on every plane of musical reality; all his ritardandos and syncopations … all his demands for legato or staccato, all his naturals are full of spiritual significance …’ Medtner’s own definition of the sonata principle was as a complex phenomenon ‘genetically tied to the simplicity of the song-form; the song-form is tied to the construction of a period; the period to a phrase; the phrase to the cadence; the cadence to the construction of the mode; the mode to the tonic.’

The Second Piano Concerto (1920/27) was first performed in Moscow, conducted by the composer’s brother. Medtner inscribed it to Rachmaninov—who returned the compliment by dedicating to him his own contemporaneous Fourth. Intriguingly, the two works are like an exchange of ‘musical letters’. Opening with a brilliant sonata-form Toccata (unusual for the substance of its reprise taking the guise of an ambitiously scaled solo cadenza), Medtner’s is overtly organized in the Rachmaninov manner: with similarly breathed and elaborated melodies; an A flat tripartite slow movement (Romance) enclosing a central agitato (à la the Rachmaninov C minor); and a final Divertimento-Rondo in the major that indulges, on the one hand, in the kind of architectural excesses found in Rachmaninov Three, and, on the other, in references to one of Rachmaninov’s songs. In his concerto (notably the finale), Rachmaninov pays homage specifically to Medtner’s peculiarly individual rhythmic style. Essentially, it must be stressed, however, that what these exchanges are about is tribute, not pastiche. Medtner is no more poor man’s Rachmaninov than Rachmaninov is rich man’s Medtner: each was possessed of a voice distinctively his own (in Medtner’s case especially so in the developmenal aspects of his Romance). During the thirties, following its first English performance (under Landon Ronald at a Queen’s Hall Philharmonic Society concert, All Saints Day, 1928), Sorabji placed a high value on the Second Concerto. Offering ‘splendid opportunities to first class pianists, musically and technically’, he thought its neglect ‘a scandal’. In 1948 Medtner recorded it with the Philharmonia under Dobroven.

Premiered by the composer and Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Albert Hall, 19 February 1944, promoted by the PRS, the wartime Third Concerto, or ‘Concerto-Ballade’, is dedicated to the Maharajah of Mysore, ‘with deep gratitude for the appreciation and furtherance of my work’. Begun in London and completed in Warwickshire between circa 1940 and 1943, it is in three movements played without a break—the first flexible in tempo, the second an Interludium, ‘Allegro’ yet at the same time ‘molto sostenuto e misterioso’, the third an ‘Allegro molto’ climaxing in a coda more temporally fluid. Ending in E major but for much of the time oscillating unpredictably between E minor and G major, the Third is like a wonderfully free fantasia, a written-out improvisation with orchestra. Manifestly, the first movement, in its surges of imagination and turbulence is a person talking—at once considered yet free, determined yet yielding, long in sentence, short in sentence, elastic in phrasing and cadence. Calling it enchanted, it ‘moves in a kind of dream world’, Holt says, ‘with occasional intrusions of human passion and conflict’. Its structure defies ready explanation: concerned with sensations of ebb and flow, it is so remarkably veiled and aurally unapparent that to reveal it at all might only destroy it. Externally, its most obvious feature is the presence of a resolute motto theme, an idée fixe which, in best Berlioz-Tchaikovsky tradition, Medtner brings back in the Interludium and finale to impart to the whole a unity musically and psycho-dramatically important.

That Medtner’s music is unknown is unjustifiable. An alloy of the intensest of emotions and sounds, of the most subtly variegated rythmic life, it can, it’s true, often overcome one’s ability to perceive at first hearing, it can overload the circuitry of our mind. Medtner’s most complex work does not clarify easily. But this should not deter us. Creatively the equal of his two most famous emigré compatriots, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky, metaphorically like an Arthurian knight of old impassioned by his lady, Medtner was a man of righteous principle who lived for music: a quiet man, ‘a gentle lion’ large of head and blue of eye, a private man whose family was the hub of his existence. As a pianist, if asked, he would play in concert (to be adored by the cognoscenti), he would broadcast for the BBC; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t (the competitive streak was foreign to his temperament). His ‘Appassionata’ was famous. His Beethoven Four, too, and his Rachmaninov and Schubert and Bach—paradoxically, music often directly in conflict with the quintessentially high Romantic melos of his own. At the piano, offering in his performances an overview crystallized out of the wisdom of age and the excitement of youth, his posture (very still, eyes shut) was Michelangeli-like. Reminiscing forty years ago, Arthur Alexander remembered how ‘… he possessed to an acute degree the rare power of colouring melodically passages that in the hands of others remained mere notes, and his subtleties of nuance and pedal were unforgettable. No one (except perhaps Josef Hofmann) produced so much effect with so little visible means …’ Medtner was an artist in love with the beauty of his muse. He played for beauty’s sake—and he composed for beauty’s sake.

Being a Russian is a duty. For Medtner, coming to England did nothing to change that. The Moscow nights, the Russian springs, the basilicas and bards of his young manhood: such was his heritage, a chalice of dreams and memories to hold for always. Prince of truth, he was one of Russia’s great sons. Hyperion

Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951)
                
Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor Op 50 [38'20]
                    
Piano Concerto No 3 in E minor Op 60 [35'27]

Credits :
Conductor – Jerzy Maksymiuk
Leader – Geoffrey Trabichoff
Orchestra – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Piano – Nikolai Demidenko 

MENDELSSOHN : The Concertos For 2 Pianos (Ian Munro, Stephen Coombs · BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra · Jerzy Maksymiuk) (1992) Serie The Romantic Piano Concerto – 3 | FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1845) was a genius of quite extraordinary dimensions. He had reached full maturity as a composer by the age of sixteen (1825, the year of the String Octet), by which time he had also proved himself a double prodigy on both piano and violin, an exceptional athlete (and a particularly strong swimmer), a talented poet (Goethe was a childhood friend and confidante), multi-linguist, water-colourist, and philosopher. He excelled at virtually anything which could hold his attention for long enough, although it was music which above all activated his creative imagination.

Mendelssohn was an exceptionally gifted pianist, whose early studies under Ludwig Berger progressed at an astonishing rate. After hearing a recital given at home by the twelve-year-old boy, Goethe exclaimed: ‘What this little man is capable of in terms of improvisation and sight-reading is simply prodigious. I would have not thought it possible at such an age.’ When a companion reminded him that he had heard Mozart extemporize at a similar age, the great poet replied: ‘Just so!’ This was in 1821, by which time Mendelssohn had already composed a violin sonata, three piano sonatas, and two operas!

Mendelssohn’s mature piano style was derived not so much from the orchestral texturing of Beethoven and Schubert, as from the filigree intricacies of the German virtuoso piano school, represented principally by Hummel and Weber, further enhanced by a Mozartian emphasis on textural clarity. It was never Mendelssohn’s intention to push contemporary keyboard instruments beyond that of which they were comfortably capable, more to utilize those qualities for which they were best adapted—brilliant clarity in the treble register, and the ability to sustain a flowing, cantabile melody without undue bass resonance.

Mendelssohn’s first surviving works in concerto form date from 1822: the D minor Violin Concerto (not the popular E minor, a much later composition) and the Piano Concerto in A minor, both with string orchestra accompaniment, closely followed by a D minor Concerto for violin, piano and strings in May 1823. The Concertos for two pianos also belong to this early group, the E major being dated 17 October 1823, and the A flat major 12 November 1824. Both works had entirely dropped out of the repertoire until, in 1950, the original manuscripts were ‘rediscovered’ in the Berlin State Library.

Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny, was also a gifted pianist, and it is almost certain that the E major Concerto was written with her in mind. However, it also appears likely that the A flat Concerto was inspired by Felix’s first encounter with the young piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles. Upon seeing the boy Mendelssohn play, even Moscheles could barely believe his eyes: ‘Felix, a mere boy of fifteen, is a phenomenon. What are all other prodigies compared with him?—mere gifted children. I had to play a good deal, when all I really wanted to do was to hear him and look at his compositions.’

The major criticism levelled at the Two-Piano Concertos is their tendency to overstretch relatively fragile musical material, as, with two soloists to contend with, Mendelssohn had been keen to ensure that the music was shared equally, thus involving an unusual amount of repetition. It would hardly be fair to expect even Mendelssohn to have achieved the miraculous thematic concision and structural cohesion of the E minor Violin Concerto and G and D minor Piano Concertos at such an early age.

The opening tutti of the E major Concerto uncovers a vein of dream-like contentment which was to become Mendelssohn’s expressive trademark. Virtually every subsequent composition contains passages of this nature contrasted, as here, by fleet-footed music of quicksilver brilliance. Even the use of Mozartian falling chromaticisms fails to cloud the blissfully trouble-free outlook.

The central 6/8 Adagio anticipates Mendelssohn’s favourite arioso Lieder ohne Worte style, whilst the high velocity finale demonstrates the composer’s precocious ability to assimilate Hummelian semiquaver athletics, and organize them into a convincing (if not yet fully developed) structure, transcending the aimless note-spinning of many of his older contemporaries.

The first movement of the A flat major Two-Piano Concerto is Mendelssohn’s longest concerto movement, and despite the composer’s declared preference for the E major Concerto, it displays a greater awareness of internal balance and structural proportions than its younger companion. The Mozartian opening theme (shades of the A major Concerto K414!) is embellished by some decidedly un-Mozartian virtuoso cascades during the soloists’ exposition, although a second lyrical idea is decidedly more restrained in its pyrotechnical aspirations.

The wistful Andante is clearly premonitory of the main theme of the G minor Piano Concerto’s slow movement, even if the continually flowing 6/8 metre and self-conscious virtuoso flourishes betray a certain lack of formal confidence in comparison with the later work.

Weber clearly marks the starting point for the good-natured Allegro vivace finale, its jocular high spirits being effectively contained by passing moments of mild contrapuntal ingenuity. The exuberant coda forces the main theme into overdrive, betraying a refreshingly boyish naivety, in stark contrast to the startling individuality and resourcefulness of the work as a whole. At only fifteen yeary of age, Mendelssohn was no mere fledgling composer but a highly creative intelligence on the verge of artistic maturity. Hyperion

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
    
Concerto for two pianos in A flat major[41'28]

Concerto for two pianos in E major[30'35]

Credits :
Conductor – Jerzy Maksymiuk
Leader – Geoffrey Trabichoff
Orchestra – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Piano – Ian Munro, Stephen Coombs

ARENSKY : Piano Concerto In F Minor, Op 2 • Fantasia On Russian Folksongs, Op 48 ♦ BORTKIEWICZ : Piano Concerto No 1 In B Flat, Op 16 (Stephen Coombs · BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra · Jerzy Maksymiuk) (1993) Serie The Romantic Piano Concerto – 4 | FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Anton Stepanovich Arensky and Sergei Eduardovich Bortkiewicz are hardly household names. Arensky’s delicious Piano Trio in D minor continues to keep its place on the fringes of the chamber repertoire, and the Waltz movement from his Suite for two pianos receives an occasional outing; otherwise nothing. Who has even heard of Bortkiewicz other than aficionados of the piano’s dustier repertoire?

Arensky was born in 1861 in Novgorod, a birthplace shared with Balakirev whose influence on the course of his country’s music during the second part of the nineteenth century was more profound than any other. Arensky, born a generation later and without the same musical genius and aggressive nationalism, fell under the spell of the post-Chopin/Liszt school (both composers revered by Balakirev and his nationalist ‘Free School’ of music). He was not going to extend the piano’s expressive potential as the mightier talents of Scriabin, Medtner and Rachmaninov were later to do.

Arensky’s gifts were, nevertheless, precocious. By the age of nine he had already composed some songs and piano pieces. His father (a doctor and accomplished amateur cellist) and mother (her son’s first teacher and an excellent pianist herself) moved to St Petersburg and the boy entered the Conservatory there in 1879, graduating in 1882, a year after writing the present Piano Concerto.

Arensky’s Opus 2 is unmistakably indebted to Chopin and Tchaikovsky, with the melodic grace of Mendelssohn and some of the more virtuosic passages of Liszt thrown in for good measure. (The last movement threatens to break into the opening of Grieg’s Piano Concerto!) Indeed, after hearing the work for the very first time, the listener somehow feels that he knows it intimately, like an old friend … undemanding, and for whom one has to make no special effort.

It’s a cosy piece, full of hummable tunes. As one would expect of a composition pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, it is expertly crafted and the piano part is distinctive and beautifully laid out. The most daring departure from convention is in the use of a 5/4 time signature in the Finale. It was a quirk of Arensky’s that he enjoyed unusual metres. (Tchaikovsky even reproached him for doing so.)

The Concerto captured the imagination of many pianists of the day—it was a favourite of the youthful Vladimir Horowitz—and it provided an effective and stylish vehicle for many a barn-stormer before its salon prettiness came to be seen as superficial and second-rate. Arensky dedicated the work to the great cellist ‘Herrn Professor Carl Davidoff’ [sic], head of the St Petersburg Conservatory during the time the composer studied there. It was a dedication repeated when he composed his celebrated Trio in Davidov’s memory.

The Concerto was published in 1883 and was an immediate success in both St Petersburg and Moscow. The composer, having won the Gold Medal for composition with his Symphony No 1 in B minor, was appointed Professor of Harmony and Counterpoint at the Moscow Conservatory. A successful if not adventurous career would seem to have been presaged by these youthful triumphs. Not only this, but he was befriended and championed by Tchaikovsky. A product of the Nationalist school of St Petersburg and now a star on the staff of the more international Moscow establishment, Arensky continued to compose prolifically as well as teach (Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Gretchaninov were among his pupils) until 1894. He resigned his post on being offered the directorship of the Imperial Court Chapel in succession to Balakirev himself, no less, who recommended Arensky for the position. This involved a move back to St Petersburg and it is significant that the other composition of Arensky’s presented here dates from 1899 and is, again, a product of his life in the city headquarters of the Russian nationalist school: Russian themes in a cosmopolitan wrapping.

The Fantasy on Russian folksongs, Opus 48, is a brief but attractive rhapsody using two folk tunes collected by the ethno-musicological pioneer Trophim Ryabinin. The first (Andante sostenuto) is in E minor; the second (Allegretto) in D minor. Slight though the piece may be, it makes for a pleasant listen on disc, for in what concert hall does one now hear this kind of piano-and-orchestra lollipop?

The directorship of the Imperial Chapel provided not only a handsome salary but also a lifetime pension of 6,000 roubles a year for Arensky. Underneath this apparently ordinary story of modest acclaim and success, however, there ran a dark and troubled (though typically Russian) streak. Arensky, from very early in his career, was an alcoholic and an inveterate gambler. Moreover, his private life remains a mystery. He never married and elected to receive few visitors—an austere and unexpected contrast to the genial, expressive lyricism of his attractive music. He died of consumption in a sanatorium in Finland in February 1906.

The Bortkiewicz Concerto has been recorded once before, albeit in a heavily cut version. This Hyperion issue is therefore a premiere recording of the complete work. The American pianist Marjorie Mitchell made several out-of-the-way concerto discs with the conductor William Strickland in the late 1950s and early ’60s, those by Carpenter, Field, Delius and Britten among them. Her recording of the Bortkiewicz Concerto was coupled with Busoni’s Indian Fantasy! That Brunswick disc has acquired something of a legendary status among collectors (it is extremely hard to come by) because Bortkiewicz’s Piano Concerto No 1 is one of the great ‘fun’ concertos with its heady bravura writing, lush orchestration, strong, well-wrought and effective material and, in the first movement, one of the most seductive, romantic themes of the whole genre. Hollywood never had it this good—close your eyes and black-and-white films of lost love, heartache and yearning passion are conjured up. If the other two movements are less successful they are only slightly so; the second is a gorgeously tuneful Andante, the Finale a Russian dance. Chronologically, of course, Hollywood has nothing to do with Bortkiewicz and his First Concerto. Dedicated to his wife, the work was premiered in 1912 (and published the following year), after which it was taken up enthusiastically.

Like Arensky, Bortkiewicz was Russian (he was born in Kharkov, 16 February 1877) and studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory—in his spare time at first, for his father insisted that he study law. ‘I inherited my mother’s pleasure in music-making’, he wrote. ‘And what a blessing it was that we made much music when I was young. My mother played the piano very well and I was passionately fond of music.’

Later, from 1900 to 1902, he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory—piano with the former Liszt pupil Alfred Reisenauer (1863–1907), and composition with Salomon Jadassohn (1831–1902), another erstwhile Liszt student and among the most celebrated German pedagogues of the time, famously arch-conservative in his codified views on harmony and counterpoint.

Unlike some of his Russian contemporaries (Rachmaninov, Medtner, Scriabin) Bortkiewicz was not a sufficiently gifted pianist to make a career as a soloist, though after his debut (Munich, 1902) he made several European tours. He made no records or piano rolls and while one critic felt he produced a ‘harsh, jarring sound’ others give the impression of him being only a capable player, at his best in his own works. His strengths, he eventually decided, were teaching and composition. He taught at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin from 1904 until the outbreak of the First World War when he was forced to return to Russia. After the Revolution he left his native land, like so many never to return again, and after a peripatetic existence, including a two-year stay in (then) Constantinople, Bortkiewicz finally settled in Vienna in 1922, dying there in October 1952.

‘I am a Romantic and a melodist’, he wrote in an essay towards the end of his life, ‘and as such and in spite of my distaste for the so-called ‘modern’, atonal and cacophonic music, I do hope that I composed some noteworthy works without getting the reputation of being an epigone or imitator of composers who lived before me.’ Bortkiewicz’s compositions are dominated by those for his instrument and many are well worth investigating (Lamentations and Consolations, Op 17, for example, and some of the Preludes from Opp 13, 15, 33 and 40, Lyrica Nova Op 59 from 1940, and the 1907 Piano Sonata No 1 in B major, Op 9). Perhaps, like the present Concerto (he wrote two others), they lack profundity and originality in the widest sense. But does the only music we appreciate have to be by the great composers who overturned systems, struck out for the unknown, and challenged their muse? One hopes not. There must always be a place for those like Arensky and Bortkiewicz who reflect so elegantly and expertly on what has gone before, rather than shake us by the ears and grab us (sometimes screaming) into the future. Hyperion

Anton Arensky (1861-1906)
    
Piano Concerto in F minor Op 2 [25'35]

Sergei Bortkiewicz (1877-1952)
    
Piano Concerto No 1 in B flat major Op 16 [35'34]

Credits :
Conductor – Jerzy Maksymiuk
Leader – Geoffrey Trabichoff
Orchestra – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Piano – Stephen Coombs