Piers

Ferdinand Ries may once have been celebrated as ‘one of the finest piano-performers of the present day’ (the 1820s), but he is now remembered chiefly for his association with Beethoven. Yet the music here is never slavishly imitative: Piers Lane makes a persuasive case for rescuing these works from the pages of musical history.

Piers Lane is easily up to tackling the volatile figures that abound in Scriabin's piano music. Indeed, his technical bravura is often breathtaking … thankfully Lane never lets us forget that the virtuosic and poetic exist in equal measure.

Ferdinand Ries may once have been celebrated as ‘one of the finest piano-performers of the present day’ (the 1820s), but he is now remembered chiefly for his association with Beethoven. Yet the music here is never slavishly imitative: Piers Lane makes a persuasive case for rescuing these works from the pages of musical history.

Youthful piano quintets from Korngold the arch-Romantic and Bartók in his pre-modernist vein make a fascinating comparison. This album offers a snapshot of early twentieth-century Austro-Hungarian chamber music as represented by two of its most individual voices.

Though lesser-known today, composers Alfred Hill and George Boyle enjoyed distinguished careers, both in their native Australia and abroad. Hill was known as the 'grand old man' of Australian musical life in his time. His Piano Concerto in A minor and Piano Sonata in A major are effectively the same work, the one being an orchestral expansion of the other. In addition to his work as a composer, Boyle took on students in New York that included such luminaries as Copland and Barber. The Romantic Piano Concerto Vol.69 features his Piano Concerto in D minor. All works are performed here by Piers Lane and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra led by Johannes Fritzsch.

The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, with the support of Garth Knox (viola) and Piers Lane (piano), continue their excellent survey of Stanford’s neglected chamber works with this recording of his String Quintet No 1 and Piano Quintet. Growing up in his native Dublin in the 1850s and ’60s, Stanford was no stranger to high-quality chamber music, even if visits to Ireland’s capital by pre-eminent executants of the genre were sporadic.

Two very different takes on the romantic piano concerto, both equally successful. The Bliss—written in 1939 for the World’s Fair in New York—is extrovert, exuberant and virtuosic, the Rubbra a profound reflection on, and continuation of, the English pastoral tradition.

When d’Albert appeared in 1881 at one of Hans Richter’s concerts in London he played his own Piano Concerto in A, but the work was never published and has not survived. However, from a review in The Musical Times of November 1881 we can reasonably deduce that the Concerto had the traditional three movements. The reviewer stated that it was ‘uncompromising in its pretensions to rank with the chief of its kind; largely developed, ambitious in style and character, and rigidly observant of classical form, while redundant in matter’.