Howard Shelley

In a world full of couplings of Schumann and Grieg's Piano Concertos in A minor, this disc offers three distinct advantages. First and most obviously, it offers an additional work, Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto in G minor, which brings the disc's total playing time up 78 minutes. Second, it offers up a soloist who's also the conductor, the multitalented Howard Shelley who directs England's Orchestra of Opera North from the keyboard.

Howard Shelley is an acknowledged expert in the area of early Romantic piano music. With this disc, Shelley presents the first installment of a six-volume set of Mendelssohn's complete solo piano music - perhaps the least well-known part of the composer's repertoire. Mendelssohn composed or began nearly two hundred works for piano. However, only about seventy were published during his lifetime.

Howard Shelley directs the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra from the piano in this latest volume of The Romantic Piano Concerto series. As ever, they perform unknown music with consummate style and deep understanding, making the best possible case for the works. We have reached Volume 63 and the works of French composer Benjamin Godard, a figure who is almost totally forgotten today. He is described by Jeremy Nicholas in his booklet note as ‘a composer who combines the sentimental melodic appeal of Massenet with the fecundity and technical facility of Saint-Saëns’.

Howard Shelley’s light touch, fresh and colourful orchestral playing, and excellent recording, make this very well worth hearing on its own account, not simply as a rediscovered rarity.

Howard Shelley continues to overturn the conventional wisdom about Mendelssohn’s unjustly neglected piano music, again demonstrating convincingly its claims on our attention.

Howard Shelley’s fascinating discs of Spohr’s symphonies with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana have reignited interest in a composer who was once the most important in Europe, and particularly so in England, where he was worshipped by all of musical society. Spohr’s Eighth Symphony is one of the composer’s more conservative experiments with the form. The Tenth is the composer’s final symphony and remained unpublished – languishing in the former Prussian State Library in Berlin for many years – until 2006. Both works bring unexpected pleasures. This is the penultimate volume of a series which as a whole is an important historical document of musical taste.

This is a welcome re-release from Hyperion on its budget Helios label. When these performances first appeared in 1990, critical opinion was divided as to their merits. The back of this CD quotes statements of high praise from the American Record Guide and Classic CD, among others. From memory, the review that appeared in Gramophone Magazine was harsh in its criticism. For my part, I incline more to the former view. This disc has much to recommend it.

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.

This 58th volume of the Romantic Piano Concerto series presents two composer-pianists who contributed to Liszt’s piano extravaganza Hexaméron (1837). Thalberg (who would be celebrating his 200th birthday in 2012) famously took part in a pianistic ‘duel’ with Liszt, and was popularly acclaimed as the greatest pianist in the world during his lifetime. He only wrote one piano concerto, and that in his teens, but it is a brilliantly effective showpiece for virtuosity and stamina, the pianist’s hands barely leaving the piano. Johann Peter Pixis has now been consigned—perhaps unfairly—to the oblivion where so many early 19th-century composers dwell. These are world premiere recordings of his charming Piano Concerto and Piano Concertino.