Wolfram Lorenzen Mendelssohn Bartók Reger Piano Concertos, Vol 1

First there was rhythm - pulsing, driving, primal rhythm. And a new word in musical terminology: Barbaro. As with sticks on skins, so with hammers on strings. The piano as one of the percussion family, the piano among the percussion family. The first and second concertos were written to be performed that way. But the rhythm had shape and direction, myriad accents, myriad subtleties. An informed primitivism. A Baroque primitivism. Then came the folkloric inflections chipped from the music of time: the crude and misshapen suddenly finding a singing voice. Like the simple melody - perhaps a childhood recollection - that emerges from the dogged rhythm of the First Concerto's second movement. András Schiff plays it like a defining moment - the piano reinvented as a singing instrument. His "parlando" (conversational) style is very much in Bartók's own image. But it's the balance here between the honed and unhoned, the brawn and beauty, the elegance and wit of this astonishing music that make these readings special.

This first of the two sets contains four indisputable masterpieces. In the stormy D minor Concerto K. 466, Brendel springs a mild surprise by playing his own cadenzas rather than Beethoven's, the ones most often used. I must confess to preferring Beethoven's unstylish but dramatic and imaginative cadenza to the first movement, but otherwise the performance is beyond reproach. Brendel adds some discreet and entirely appropriate ornamentation to the many repetitions of the second movement's main theme. The Olympian C major K. 467, with its incomparably beautiful slow movement, also receives some much-needed decoration: here the cadenzas are by Radu Lupu and are a bit quirkier than necessary.

Not just because this disk is the only 1 in the series without a review on this site, but also because it concerns a re-issue in SACD format, I thought it might be useful to share my views with the Super Audio community. To start with the end: My verdict is a wholehearted positive 1 in both artistic & technical sense.

In history, the beginning of the genre of piano or cembalo concertos is usually associated with the name of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose sons had continued the undertaking which their father had begun. Thus, for example, Mozart was influenced by C.P.E. Bach in his own, further development of the genre, the "classical" character of which would become significantly influenced by him. The source of Haydn's inspiration to write piano concertos, and knowledge of appropriate compositions by his contemporaries, cannot be determined for certain, as we do not have any reliable documentation.

Smaller concertos for piano and modest orchestral forces were a feature of British composition in the first half of the 20th century. Often they were written for a special occasion, and typically vanished into oblivion thereafter. During the COVID period we were looking for things to record with small numbers of players, and stumbled across this treasury: short concertos written for entertainment that don't outstay their welcome.

We are accustomed to looking to Pearl for gems from the past, and these transfers from previously unpublished live recordings of the 70-year-old Horszowski's Mozart, complete with crackles, muffed notes and coughing fits aplenty, do indeed sound as if they come from the dark backward and abysm of time. They date, in fact, only from 1962-72: near contemporaries of Barenboim's Mozart concertos with the English Chamber Orchestra. These performances, though, were taken from radio tapes and from a disc-cutting machine fed directly by the microphones in the Metropolitan Museum of Art where this concert series was held. They are alive with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of music-making which involved no record companies, no editing and no public relations.

Born in the vicinity of Cologne, only two years after and some sixty km distant from Beethoven, Johann Wilhelm Wilms was once a musical force to be reckoned with. In Amsterdam, where he lived from the age of 19, his music was actually performed more frequently than Beethoven’s at one period, and his orchestral works were played in such musical centres as Leipzig. Besides chamber music and solo sonatas Wilms composed several symphonies and solo concertos (for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and cello) as well as piano concertos for his own use, five of which were published between 1799 and 1820. (Two more have been lost.) He also appeared regularly as soloist in concertos by other composers.