Baptist Cramer Howard Shelley

Cramer’s piano concertos were written to showcase his formidable proficiency in the new pianistic techniques—and evolving piano technologies—of the day. Howard Shelley here revisits the composer, delivering persuasive accounts of three further concertos.

Listening to these fluent, expressive performances, it’s difficult to see how even Cramer—one of the great virtuosos of his day—could have matched the effortless mastery so characteristic of Howard Shelley’s pianism.

Imagine an early Beethoven piano concerto, but less fiery, less purposeful, more decorative, and that will tell you what to expect of the first of the works on this disc by Johann Baptist Cramer. Beethoven’s junior by a couple of months, Cramer was born in Mannheim but made his career in London, where he was one of the leading figures of the ‘London Pianoforte School’ (with Clementi and Dussek among others) in the early years of the 19th century and a piano teacher of enormous (and still continuing) influence.