Reicha Piano Trios

[Alan Howe]

I am on a voyage of discovery, venturing further into the works of Anton Reicha. The latest recording to come my way is the Supraphon CD of his Piano Trios Op.101, Nos.1-3, published in 1824. This is just magical stuff - more Schubertian, I'd say, than Beethovenian - and often with a delicious open-air quality to the writing. Reicha was no mere also-ran as a composer, I think. There's a touch of genius about these works...

[kolaboy]

Glad he's finally emerging from the titan's shadow.

[TerraEpon]

There's also a disc of numbers 4-6....both are unfortunately long OOP, though I believe a recordings of a couple of them individually are floating around.

[eschiss1]

Op.101 No.2 is on Alpha 369. with a string quartet, string quintet, piano sonata and other works.
The first disc (nos.1-3) can still be heard streaming on Naxos Music Library, as can the Alpha disc.
However, as to the discs being out of print, the first isn't, though the second may be:

https://www.supraphon.com/album/151-rejcha-piano-trios

(go directly to the source when possible rather than stopping at Amazon...) (I don't know of a source for the UK; I assume that Supraphon.cz has them though.)

[TerraEpon]

Ah my mistake....apparently this is a different recording than what I was thinking of.

[chill319]

To judge by his keyboard fugues, Reicha had a spark of genius, no doubt. Who else in 1800 Paris or Vienna had written an entire piece in 5/8 meter? And on the existential side, who else at that time would would even have thought of writing (much less pulling off) a fugue where the subject has two fingers alternating rapidly on a single note? Or on the reception history side, who else would have written an entirely new fugue based on Scarlatti's old Cat's Fugue subject? (Yes, Czerny wrote a very nice Scarlatti-style sonata, but that was 40-odd years later.)

[Double-A]

They seem to have been quite different kinds of genius (maybe that is why they got along well).  Beethoven's ambition was always to write the best music he could achieve (or even the best anybody could achieve).  Reicha appears to have been more an innovator (maybe not quite innovation for innovation's sake but still in that neighborhood) driven at least in part by curiosity:  Can I write a fugue about such a theme?  How does a piece in 5/8 sound and how would I compose one?  He tried out a lot of ideas just to see if they were practicable.  He composed a "prototype" and then he moved on to the next idea.

My own impression:  I find some of his music very attractive (his quartets for flute and string trio are better and more interesting than Mozart's for example, at least the two that I have heard).  But I have also listened to music of his that I found less appealing.

Not that Beethoven wasn't an innovator.  But he generally innovated with a clear artistic objective in mind, not as an experiment (maybe one could call the sixth symphony and/or the choral phantasy an experiment but not much else).

[eschiss1]

Rather a generalization when it comes to Beethoven, that "always" (and he's in my top 2 or 3 composers and I still say this.)