Hyperion Romantic Piano Concerto Series: Beach/Chaminade/Howell

[FBerwald]

Glad that Has Hyperion finally relented?.... Raff was / is too good to pass up. If this does come out, it will be one of my top fav.'s beside Stojowski, Scharwenka 4 and Herz!

[Revilod]

Yes. Let's hope it happens. The old Ponti recording of the piano concerto introduced me to Raff and,  if the RPC series always sells, then a Raff disc should do wonders to promote his music.

[eschiss1]

I missed something there... "I think it will come" (Gareth) = "Hyperion finally has relented" (FBerwald)? (I hope so too, but that's not how I read the first statement at all...)

[FBerwald]

Duly amended... Sorry to have jumped to conclusions but the mere possibility of Raff finally appearing in the RPC was a something I had always hoped for.

[Mark Thomas]

The last I heard Hyperion recently briefly flirted with the idea of coupling Raff's Piano Concerto, Ode au Printemps and some solo piano or piano four-hands fillers, but have now once again put it on the back burner. There is though another project for exactly this coupling which should see recordings made in spring next year all being well. I'm sworn to secrecy on that subject, however. I have always thought that the ideal non-Raff coupling for his Piano Concerto would be Hans Bronsart's - they were friends and shared a common heritage in being a part of Liszt's circle in Weimar in the early 1850s. We badly need a modern recording of Bronsart's barnstormer!

[Alan Howe]

Thanks for that hint, Mark.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Thank you too, from me. I do agree about the coupling of Bronsart's PC - ideal with Raff. And we DO need a good modern recording of that outstanding work.

[Ebubu]

Have not seen anything on the Hyperion website about the Beach recording.  As it been edited / deleted ?

[FBerwald]

The Romantic Piano Concerto Vol. 70 - Beach, Chaminade & Howell



http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68130

Dorothy Howell - Piano Concerto in D minor
Amy Beach - Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, Op. 45
Cécile Chaminade - Concertstück in C-sharp minor, Op. 40

Danny Driver (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Rebecca Miller

[Alan Howe]

And here's the introduction to the release:

Amy Marcy Cheney—later famous as Amy Beach—was born on 5 September 1867, in Henniker, New Hampshire, a small mill town set on the Contoocook River. Her mother Clara Cheney was an austere Calvinist, but she was also a fine amateur pianist. Her reaction to Amy's prodigious musicality was to ban her from playing the piano. It was the intervention of Amy's aunt that enabled her to play the instrument and to give her earliest public performances. At the age of seven she gave a recital in the local Congregational church, recalling later that she was 'allowed to play in a few concerts—I imagine the consent was unwilling'. Indeed it was, since following a move to Chelsea, Massachusetts (just across the Mystic River from Boston), her mother forbade any further public appearances, though Amy took lessons from leading Boston teachers, including Carl Baermann (a Liszt pupil), and for a year she studied harmony and counterpoint with the organist and composer Junius M Hill.

It was not until Amy was sixteen years of age that her mother finally permitted her daughter to make her official debut as a soloist, when she played Moscheles's Piano Concerto No 3 in Boston. Audience and critics alike were exceptionally enthusiastic, and Amy herself wrote that with this performance 'life was beginning'. In 1885 she was the soloist in the last concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra season. In December 1885 she married a successful Boston doctor, Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, and henceforth she was known as Mrs H H A Beach. Their marriage agreement (possibly at the behest of Amy's mother) required that she conform to what Dr Beach considered the proper conduct of a society wife: there was to be no concert-giving, and she was not to teach the piano. He allowed her to give one recital a year provided there was no fee (the proceeds going to charity), and permitted occasional appearances as a soloist with orchestras. Once again, Amy Beach was thwarted in pursuing her vocation as a concert pianist, but at least she was able to devote herself to composition—something her husband genuinely encouraged. As Adrienne Fried Block put it: 'Clara Cheney had succeeded in getting the genie back in the bottle. However, through his crucial support of her creative work, Henry Beach helped bring the genie back out in another form.' ('A "veritable autobiography"? Amy Beach's Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, Op 45', Musical Quarterly, Summer 1994, p400). Apart from one year of study during her teens, Amy Beach was self-taught as a composer, but the quality and individuality of her work was quickly recognized. In 1896 the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere of her 'Gaelic' Symphony, and Beach came to be accepted as one of the 'Boston Six' group of composers—along with George Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine and Horatio Parker. After hearing the 'Gaelic' Symphony, Chadwick wrote to Beach: 'I always feel a thrill of pride myself whenever I hear a fine work by any of us, and as such you will have to be counted [as] one of the boys.'

Work on the piano concerto began in 1897 and it was clearly intended not only as a major composition, but also as a way for Beach to return to the concert platform that she missed so acutely. Reminders of this surrounded her at the time: in 1895 her father died and her mother Clara moved in with Amy and her husband. The tensions between these three, particularly in terms of Beach's musical career, cannot have been easy to bear. The first performance took place in Symphony Hall, Boston, on 7 April 1900 with the composer as soloist, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Gericke. The two-piano score was published the same year by the firm of Arthur P Schmidt, with a dedication to the Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño (1853–1917), one of the greatest soloists of the age (Sir Henry Wood described her as 'this great woman who looked like a queen among pianists—and played like a goddess'). Carreño wrote a gracious letter accepting the dedication with delight, and she tried to arrange a performance with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1901. However, these plans came to nothing and Carreño never played the work, so the task of advocating the concerto fell squarely on Beach herself. She once wrote that a composition could be 'a veritable autobiography', and the piano concerto has elements that can certainly be considered in this way. Several of the themes are quotations from earlier songs, and the idea of a piano soloist (Beach) pitted against an orchestra (the forces in her upbringing and home life that conspired to make her career so difficult) is a persuasive one. Beach herself, however, gave nothing away in her own programme note on the work:

    The work is in four movements, the last two being connected.

    The first, Allegro [moderato], is serious in character, piano and orchestra vying with each other in the development of the two principal themes, of which the second is songlike in character. There is a richly worked out cadenza for the solo instrument near the close of the movement.

    The second movement, Scherzo, bears the subtitle 'perpetuum mobile', and consists of a piquant etude rhythm unbroken throughout the piano part, set against an orchestral background that sings the melody in the stringed instruments. This is a short movement, with a brief cadenza for the piano before the final resumption of the principal theme.

    The slow movement is a dark, tragic lament, which, after working up to an impassioned climax, passes through a very soft transition directly into the last movement, a bright vivacious rondo.

    Before the close there comes a repetition of the lament theme, with varied development, quickly followed by a renewal of the rondo and then a coda.

The four-movement structure is perhaps an echo of Brahms's second piano concerto, and as Beach herself suggests in her note, the soloist and orchestra are in a state of tension, even opposition—'vying with each other', as she puts it. This is apparent throughout the long first movement, which is much the most extended of the four. The second movement quotes from her song 'Empress of Night', setting a poem by her husband, with a dedication to her mother. The figurations of the piano accompaniment are transformed in the concerto into the soloist's perpetuum mobile theme, which—in this new guise—consumes and all but buries the main melody of the song. The slow movement quotes from the song 'Twilight', another setting of her husband's verse; freed of Dr Beach's rather stiff words, the music develops with a tragic intensity that is all the more remarkable given the conciseness of the movement. The rondo finale is marked Allegro con scioltezza, indicating fluency and agility. The soloist takes the lead throughout, introducing each idea, and growing in confidence and domination. If we accept the evidence for an unstated autobiographical programme lying behind this work, then Beach's finale has the soloist (herself) emerging triumphant and free. It was to be a prophetic metaphor: in 1910 her husband died, and her mother's death came early the next year. Free at last to make her own professional decisions, Beach in her early forties was able to pursue her career as a concert pianist, and she undertook several successful tours in Europe, and while she continued to compose, it was performing that gave her the greatest pleasure before she retired from concert-giving in 1940. In Musical America in 1917, she declared that 'the joy of giving of your highest powers is beyond description ... When I play there is only limitless enthusiasm and enjoyment.'

The case of Cécile Chaminade is rather different from that of Amy Beach, but one similarity was parental disapproval: her father refused to allow Chaminade to study at the Paris Conservatoire, despite her obvious gifts. She had private piano lessons with the noted pedagogue Félix Le Couppey, and studied the violin with Martin Pierre Marsick, and composition with Benjamin Godard. As a child, she played some of her own compositions to Georges Bizet, a neighbour in the Parisian suburb of Le Vésinet, and he was much taken with her talents. (Chaminade later attended the calamitous premiere of Carmen and later wrote an essay describing Bizet's suffering after his rejection by the establishment.) Much of her career was spent as a touring pianist–composer, and her considerable popularity rested to a large extent on short, often charming character pieces, and on several songs. Ambroise Thomas admired her music, noting that 'this is not a woman who composes, but a composer who is a woman', and several of her more extended works were successful. Most were composed during the 1880s, after which she concentrated on smaller forms. Her Piano Trio No 1 was included in a concert devoted entirely to her music at the Salle Érard in 1880, and the following year her Suite d'orchestre was given by the Société nationale de musique. Other major works included the comic opera La Sévillane, the ballet Callirhoë, a second piano trio, a piano sonata, Les Amazones—a 'dramatic symphony' for soloists, chorus and orchestra—and the Concerstück for piano and orchestra, completed in 1888.

The Concertstück and Les Amazones were first performed in a concert put on by the Cercle catholique in Antwerp on 18 April 1888, with Chaminade herself as the soloist. The following year, on 20 January 1889, she played the work in Paris at the Concerts Lamoureux where it was received with enthusiasm. The same year, the Concertstück was played at the Concerts Colonne by the pianist Louise Steiger, to whom Chaminade dedicated the work on the published score. For several years it appeared quite regularly on concert programmes in Paris and beyond, including a performance at St James's Hall in London on 23 June 1892. On that occasion it was played in a version for two pianos, with Chaminade joined by the British pianist Amina Goodwin (whose teachers included Liszt and Clara Schumann). Two decades later, during an American tour in 1908, Chaminade played the Concertstück with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Karl Pohlig, its music director at the time.

The Concertstück begins in stirring style, with the strings playing tremolo open fifths and a theme on the horns starting with a rising fourth: the kinship with Wagner's Flying Dutchman is unmistakable, and throughout the work some influence of Wagner and Liszt is apparent, not least the Lisztian flourish with which the piano makes its entrance. Over the course of the single movement, lasting a quarter of an hour, Chaminade develops four main themes in a language that is unambiguously French, with echoes of Saint-Saëns and Bizet, and a liking for 'exotic' harmonies. The orchestration is brilliantly effective, and she may have taken advice on this from her brother-in-law, Moritz Moszkowski. The end result is a piece of considerable individuality, combining zestful energy and a rich seam of lyrical melody, affirming the enduring value of Chaminade's larger works.

The British composer–pianist Dorothy Howell studied at the Royal Academy of Music, where she was taught the piano by Tobias Matthay and composition by John Blackwood McEwen. Her musical voice is both distinctive and cosmopolitan, with influences including Richard Strauss. Her first success came soon after graduating: the symphonic poem Lamia was given its first performance by Sir Henry Wood at the Promenade Concerts in 1919, when it was greeted enthusiastically (The Times on 13 September 1919 noted that it 'showed extraordinary promise both in the actual musical matter and in the handling of orchestral effect'). Wood repeated Lamia in each of the six subsequent Proms seasons, providing a notable example of sustained success for new work. The earliest sketches for Howell's piano concerto date from before the premiere of Lamia, but Howell set the work aside until 1922, when she took it up again in earnest, completing the score in July 1923. She sent it immediately to Sir Henry Wood. He conducted the premiere at the Queen's Hall on 23 August 1923 during the Proms season, with the composer herself as soloist. Reviews were lukewarm, suggesting that Howell had not fulfilled the promise of Lamia. In 1927 Adrian Boult conducted the concerto in Birmingham, and Wood repeated it at the Proms (again with Howell herself as the soloist), but apart from a performance by Cyril Smith in 1931, it quickly faded from the repertoire. Howell was dispirited by the indifferent reaction to the concerto—so much so that she virtually abandoned large-scale forms thereafter, though there are sketches for a projected symphony from the 1940s. The concerto is written in a single span, comprising three sections marked Moderato marcato, Andante con moto e tranquillo (ending in a solo cadenza) and Allegro moderato, and its rediscovery in the twenty-first century is long overdue.

Nigel Simeone © 2017

[flyingdutchman]

How about Röntgen's concertos?  Are there more than the 2 and 4 that CPO have out?  I imagine Hyperion wanting to include those at some point.

[FBerwald]

Don't want to turn this into a wish list but if there are ppl here who can suggest to Hyperion and may be make it happen, Rubinstein's 5th Concerto would benefit from a current reading!

[Alan Howe]

Don't want to turn this into a wish list

Indeed, let's not. That's a discussion for another thread - which anyone is welcome to open, of course...

[Gareth Vaughan]

Just to remind people that the concert I organised in London's  Cadogan Hall in 2010 with the Orion Orchestra and soloist Valentina Seferinova included the first performance in over 70 years of Dorothy Howell's piano concerto. It was much enjoyed.

[TerraEpon]

I'm fine with the Naxos version of the Beach, but I suppose it's a good enough piece to have twice...

A new recording of Chaminade on the flip side is much appreciated, given my love for her music.

As for Howell....that would be new to me. Given them circumstances of its previous performances from the blurb it sounds like it might be right up my ally though....