Chopin Piano Concertos

Pianist Liebrecht Vanbeckevoort (1984) was one of the laureates and the audience’s favourite of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium in 2007. Since that time he has built an honourable reputation as a concert pianist, giving recitals in prestigious concert halls in Europe, Israel, China, South Africa, Canada and the USA.

Dreyschock and Kullak are today only footnotes in the biographies of those who emerged from the nineteenth century as giants of the musical world, but in their time both artists were very significant indeed.

Hyperion’s celebrated Romantic Piano Concerto series reaches volume 44. This disc includes two prize-winning concertos written in the 1890s by the Polish composer-pianist Henryk Melcer.

If the name Friedrich Kalkbrenner is familiar at all, it’s probably for his famous suggestion that Chopin would benefit from three years of study with him (a bold offer the Pole wisely turned down). But, as Hyperion’s ever-expanding Romantic Piano Concerto series has repeatedly shown, received historical opinion and musical quality don’t always go hand in hand. With Volume 56 we reach the second and final instalment of Kalkbrenner’s concertos, dazzlingly played by Howard Shelley, directing the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra from the keyboard. For all that Kalkbrenner wasn’t afraid to write big, bold orchestral introductions, it’s when the pianist makes his entry that you realize what a jawdropping player he must have been, with writing of such glittering, glistening panache that it must have had those polite salon ladies reaching for their smelling salts.

The 150th anniversary of Hummel's death provides a timely spur to rescue these third and fourth of his half-dozen or so concertos from unwarranted neglect: they have, it's true, been recorded before (though not for 20 years), but previously only with damaging cuts. Even more than the piano sonatas, recently issued (Arabesque ABQ6564/6, 12/86), they illustrate the exuberant keyboard virtuosity for which Hummel was famous, and in the performance of which Stephen Hough scores a spectacular success in his record debut.

The concerto performances here have been available in a number of guises over the years, and have rarely been out of the catalogue. In their last incarnation they were coupled with the other items from Perahia’s later, digital solo disc, namely the Variations sérieuses, Op.54 and the famous Rondo Capriccioso, Op.14, as well as the Prelude and Fugue that’s here again. The powers-that-be at Sony must have decided that the Piano Sonata represents better value, and it is certainly a very substantial piece, making a well-filled re-issue.

Krystian Zimerman is getting better as he gets older. He used to be one of a half-dozen great young pianists, a brilliant virtuoso with tremendous expressivity, enormous soul, and a habit of making even fewer recordings than Argerich or Pollini. Over the years of ever-fewer recordings, he's grown into an astounding virtuoso and the emotional power of his interpretations have grown with his technique.

Through his far-reaching endeavors as composer, performer, educator, and ethnomusicolgist, Béla Bartók emerged as one of the most forceful and influential musical personalities of the twentieth century. Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania), on March 25, 1881, Bartók began his musical training with piano studies at the age of five, foreshadowing his lifelong affinity for the instrument. Following his graduation from the Royal Academy of Music in 1901 and the composition of his first mature works – most notably, the symphonic poem Kossuth (1903) – Bartók embarked on one of the classic field studies in the history of ethnomusicology. With fellow countryman and composer Zoltán Kodály, he traveled throughout Hungary ……..

From Allmusic