Only Piano

Wilhelm Kempff (1895–1991), one of the great piano masters, receives an exceptional tribute from the label with which he was most closely associated. This is a beautiful, limited-edition 35-CD box of Kempff’s complete solo repertoire on DG and Decca Classics. It includes the stereo Beethoven sonata cycle, the Schubert sonata cycle, generous anthologies of Bach, Brahms, Liszt, Schubert, and Schumann – plus Chopin and Baroque. There are many rarities, not readily available at present.

Baroque powerhouse Domenico Scarlatti – son of the great Alessandro Scarlatti and born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Friderich Handel – wrote an enormous 555 keyboard sonatas. These were mostly to be performed on the harpsichord, although several sources suggest that he may have also written some for the fortepiano at the Spanish court, where he was employed from 1733. The universal appeal of these sonatas – containing Scarlatti’s trademark influence of Iberian folk music and dances – is such that they have been pushed beyond the boundaries of the intended instrument, and thus the recording also boasts performances of selected sonatas on the harp and accordion, bringing these wonderful sonatas into the 21st century.

Very recently passed away at age 89 Simeon ten Holt was the Icon of Dutch minimalism. His works for multiple pianos include his most famous work, ‘Canto Ostinato’, which gained cult status with a large audience not necessarily familiar with traditional classical music. The slowly shifting repeated patterns in Ten Holt’s music have a hypnotic and hallucinatory effect on listeners, during concerts which may take several hours. Dutch pianist Jeroen van Veen is “the leading exponent of minimalism in Holland” (Alan Swanson in Fanfare), a close acquaintance of Ten Holt, the ideal interpreter of his music.

The unjustly neglected piano quartet (J76) was completed in September of the year 1809, which the 22-year-old Weber spent in Stuttgart. It was originally offered to the publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, but he rejected it, advising the composer that it created wanton ‘confusion in the arrangement of its ideas’ and indeed too obviously imitated the ‘bizarreries’ of Beethoven. However, the work was issued a year later by the Bonn firm of Beethoven’s friend and admirer Nikolaus Simrock, whose ears were more receptive to the peculiarities of the score than Nägeli.

Mozart’s great musical love was opera. This rather peremptory statement is also unquestionable. He confessed to his father that he would “cry” out of envy when he listened to an opera written by somebody else. Yet, the problem was that – at his time just as today – operas were very expensive, and one had to have an established fame and a foothold in the world of music in order to be commissioned one.

Swept along by the spirit of the day, Romantic chamber music came to be defined by an increasingly important role of the piano within the ensemble: the reign of the string quartet was eventually brought to an end, making way in particular for the piano trio with violin and cello. Throughout the Romantic repertoire, many works bear witness to the richness of this genre. The Second Piano Trio, Op.26 by Felix Mendelssohn and the Third Trio, Op.26 by Edouard Lalo are of course only two examples of the genre, but undeniably splendid specimens, brought to light in this recording.

Ronald Brautigam, with the congenial support of Die Kölner Akademie, under Michael Alexander Willens, here performs Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 24 and 25, both composed in 1786. The C major concerto is in fact one of the most expansive of all classical piano concertos, rivalling Beethoven’s fifth concerto. Their grandeur immediately made them popular fare in the concert hall – Mendelssohn, for instance, had No.24 in his repertoire through the 1820s and 1830s.