Ries Piano Concerto

Ferdinand Ries was a confidant of Beethoven and a composer and pianist who followed him rather slavishly. Well known during his lifetime, he was gradually forgotten after his death. This isn't hard to understand, for his works are on balance imitative; other composers of the era understood Beethoven's example better by either avoiding it (Schubert) or trying to match its extremity (Mendelssohn, in the Symphony No. 2). Yet the revival of Ries' works helps modern listeners understand how Beethoven's contemporaries heard his music. This disc, part of a series on the Naxos label devoted to Ries' piano concertos, contains a pair of works that gives a good impression of his music.

This second instalment in the continuing cycle of Ries's piano concertos from Naxos is a disc for your wish-list. Ries is more famous today for being Beethoven's pupil and biographer than for his own career in music. In his day he ranked with Hummel and, yes, even with Beethoven himself as one of Europe's greatest composer-pianists. Thanks to the efforts of Naxos and Allan Badley's Artaria Editions, we can now hear for ourselves what it was that so excited nineteenth century audiences.

No critic in his/her right mind would assert that Ferdinand Ries' piano concertos are in the same aesthetic class as Beethoven's works in the same form. Like the concertos of his early Romantic contemporary Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ries' works are far more about showing off the soloist and entertaining the audience than are Beethoven's more nobly conceived and executed masterpieces. Still, one would have to have a critical heart of stone not to be beguiled by Ries' thoroughly attractive concertos. As played here by pianist Christopher Hinterhuber with Uwe Grodd leading the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, three of Ries' works for piano and orchestra receive splendidly performed and wholly persuasive readings.

Ferdinand Ries must have made a strong impression as a pianist. Beethoven, a gifted pianist in his own right, even entrusted the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3 to Ries. The two had known each other since their days together in Bonn, when Riess parents took the half-orphan Ludwig into their family. Ries was Beethovens right-hand man in Vienna, and what he learned from his great model, who was fourteen years his senior, is impressively demonstrated by the Franz Ensemble on its debut album: brilliant virtuosity meets Classical form, and tradition appears in new guise for a very special anticipation of the 250th anniversary of Beethovens birth!

Ferdinand Ries was Beethoven's student and a fine pianist who gave the premiere of his teacher's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37. His own music is clearly in Beethoven's debt, but it was popular enough to hold its own in the early nineteenth century. Ries certainly understood Beethoven's revolutionary innovations quickly enough. The two sonatas on this disc, although not published until 1817, were composed in 1807 or 1808, and they are full of attempts to replicate Beethoven's dramatic strokes. Consider the D flat major opening of the slow introduction of the Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 11/2, and the way the implications of the unstable tonality are carried through the movement.

The figure of Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838) enjoys a peripheral familiarity among music-lovers as the friend and amanuensis of Beethoven. A bond had formed when Ries’s father Franz taught Beethoven in Bonn. While Beethoven doubtless cast his eye over his friend and student’s pieces from time to time, he sent Ries to his own teacher Johann Albrechtsberger for lessons in composition.

Teunis van der Zwart and Alexander Melnikov have chosen to pay tribute to Giovanni Punto, now unknown to most music lovers, even though he truly established the cor basse (horn focused on the low register) by devoting no less than sixteen concertos to it! It was he who inspired Beethoven's famous Sonata op.17; the pieces by Danzi and Ries also bear the mark of his legacy. This recording provides an opportunity to discover the unique sound of this instrument in four emblematic works.

Beethoven’s monumental contribution to Western classical music is celebrated here in this definitive collection marking the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Surveying the totality of his career and achievement, the Complete Edition spans orchestral, concerto, keyboard, chamber, music for the stage, choral and vocal works, encompassing his most familiar and iconic masterpieces, alongside rarities and recently reconstructed fragments and sketches in world premiere recordings. The roster of artists and ensembles includes some of Beethoven’s greatest contemporary exponents, in performances that have won critical acclaim worldwide.

Teunis van der Zwart and Alexander Melnikov have chosen to pay tribute to Giovanni Punto, now unknown to most music lovers, even though he truly established the cor basse (horn focused on the low register) by devoting no less than sixteen concertos to it. It was he who inspired Beethoven's famous Sonata op.17; the pieces by Danzi and Ries also bear the mark of his legacy. This recording provides an opportunity to discover the unique sound of this instrument in four emblematic works.