Chopin Piano Concertos

The popular and critically admired Chandos recordings of John Field’s expressive cycle of Piano Concertos are brought together for the first time as a limited edition 4-CD set and released at the price of only 2 CDs. A major forerunner of the Romantic school of pianism that culminated in Chopin, Dublin-born pianist and composer John Field had scarcely received his due until Chandos released the performances of the Piano Concertos by fellow countryman, Miceal O’Rourke.

Irish by birth, John Field gained an international reputation as one of the finest pianists of his time, with an influential delicacy and nuance in his playing that is expressed in his innovative and poetically lyrical Nocturnes. Field’s earlier Sonatas are more classical in feel, but their sense of flow and dramatic narrative exhibit qualities that are developed and given added virtuoso panache in his fine Piano Concertos, works admired by Liszt, Chopin and Schumann. ‘Benjamin Frith has done a stellar job in bringing these concertos into the sunlight, brilliantly supported by the Northern Sinfonia under David Haslam’ (Pianist magazine).

Howard Shelley’s third disc in Hyperion’s traversal of the complete extant piano concertos by Ignaz Moscheles brings us triumphant performances of the fourth and fifth concertos which are complemented by a spirited rendition of the Recollections of Ireland, composed almost by way of thanks for divine deliverance from a storm-tossed crossing of the Irish Sea in 1826.

In my own compositions, no conscious effort has been made to be original, or Romantic or Nationalistic, or anything else. I write down on paper the music I hear within me, as naturally as possible…

Stephen Hough is widely regarded as one of the most important and distinctive pianists of his generation. From highly acclaimed performances of central repertoire in recital, in recording, and with the world’s greatest orchestras to an interest in contemporary and neglected nineteenth-century works, he integrates the imagination and pianistic colour of the past with the scholarship and intellectual rigour of the present, illuminating the very essence of the music he plays. He was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 in recognition of his achievements, and in the 2014 New Year’s Honours List he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

A new recording of Weber's piano concertos was obviously long overdue, and this one fits the bill more than adequately, coming as it does generously coupled with the much better known Konzertstück and in first-rate sound quality from HMV. Not the least of its virtues is the light it casts on the origins of the piano idiom of Chopin and Liszt and, in the case of the Konzertstück, on the very foundations of the romantic concerto. I wouldn't envy any historian out to determine who was responsible for which innovation in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, but certainly to hear so many fully-formed romantic textures in music dating from 1810-21 is an instructive, not to say startling, experience.