Scharwenka - Piano Concerto No. 4

[FBerwald]

Finally, a live concert performance with pianist François Du Toit and Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Victor Yampolsky.

[Alan Howe]

Nice. Wonder if it's been done anywhere since 2014?

[FBerwald]

Didn't Stephen Hough himself do a concert performance (not sure if it was before or after the momentous Hyperion recording of 94?!

[John Boyer]

Hough has done it in concert a number of times -- in Washington circa 2002, among others. 

[Alan Howe]

Wow! That's a generation ago now.

[FBerwald]

This concerto needs to be on the concert platform; It's sure to be a crowd pleaser. Did anyone see the audience reaction at the end - Standing ovation and rightly so! What magnificent music.

[eschiss1]

Incidentally, how does the Naxos recording compare to the one on Hyperion?

[Alan Howe]

It is magnificent music and it should be played far more often. However, in the minds of concert promoters and bean counters it's not Rachmaninov.

[FBerwald]

Equally exciting although a very different interpretation as to that by Hough. I'm not sure how to explain it, give it a spin. I'm not a fan of the Chandos one, especially the 4th; but that set takes the cake for arguably the best version of the 2nd concerto [C minor]. I haven't yet heard Laurence Jeanningros recording of PC 1 & 2 on Centaur. There is a recording of PC 1 by Seta Tanyel, which I adore for it's laidback playing, very different from Marc-André Hamelin and Earl Wild's take.

[Martin Eastick]

I agree totally Alan! It always surprises and annoys me intensely when I see Scharwenka's 4 concerti compared unfavourably with those of Rachmaninov, usually by individuals who probably have little or no working knowledge of Scharwenka's compositional output, with its strong Germanic bias, and Polish inflection!. Putting things quite simply, the two composers are quite different in style, and it is perhaps unfortunate that only a relatively short period of time separates the two composers' concerti.

Scharwenka's 4 concerti constitutes a strong group, any one of which would surely go down well with an unsuspecting audience. It is perhaps more than relevant to mention this at the moment during the current Proms season, with its monotonous, repetetive, unimaginative programming, at times reinforced by a recurring institutionalised "political correctness"! I know similar thoughts have been echoed here previously, but hearing the sheer enthusiasm emanating from the performance highlighted in this thread really emphasises the need to get such music "out there", by means of public performance!

[Ilja]

For me, the attractive aspect of Scharwenka's combo of concerti is that they each possess an individual identity, not unlike Brahms's symphonies do. 

[John Boyer]

I concur with the Brahms symphony analogy. The four Scharwenka concertos each has an individual character. No one sounds like the other.  Each is a very different take on the idea of what a concerto can be.

I think the negative comparisons to Rachmaninoff are rather unfair too, since Rachmaninoff belongs to a different generation. Scharwenka is old enough to be Rachmaninoff's father.  And even then, now that I think of it, we only hear the middle two Rachmaninoff concertos, while the First and Fourth languish (although I should not forget the Paganini Rhapsody, since, if not strictly a concerto, it is a concertante work).

I have no doubt that audiences would enjoy any of the Scharwenka concertos -- if they bothered to show up having seen his name on the program. I asked one of our local conductors about programming things off the beaten path. He said he would like to do it (he had a fondness for Reger) but was reluctant to, because every time they did program something a little bit out-of-the-way he could count an extra 200 empty seats in the hall.

[Alan Howe]

The comparison with Rachmaninov is just plain daft - especially when one considers that Scharwenka's first PC dates from 1876 (the same year as Brahms' 1st Symphony, when the Russian was just three years old). Stylistically, he's from an earlier generation.

[Pyramus]

I've just listened to Scharwenka's fourth piano concerto, with the aid of the score on the TV screen (at least a piano reduction of the orchestra part, which is much easier to follow). I'd never previously heard any of his music and found this to be an attractive and very impressive work in four movements, lasting 43 minutes. I can imagine this would go down well at the Proms. The problem is, as has been suggested above, that there is an unlimited supply of music out there, including some masterpieces rarely or never performed, but the audience is finite and concert promoters would rather fill the hall with Tschaikovsky or Rachmaninov than have several hundred empty seats because punters don't want to risk Scharwenka (or Draeseke, Raff or Grimm or many others).

[Martin Eastick]

With regards to the concerns of "risking" empty seats on behalf of the promoters, the BBC Promenade Concerts surely provide us with a special case in point - almost unique in fact, which is why I mentioned this in my previous post! To programme such works as the Scharwenka concerti on such a universally acknowledged platform would help their cause immensely, and a carefully chosen and balanced programme (obviously not including some daft commission) may be well worth trying out, as the Proms concerts seem to sell themselves, for what they are.