Howard Shelley Romantic Piano Concerto Vol 74

CD Details

• Released: March 2, 2018
• Originally Released: 2018
• Label: Hyperion

Product Description:

The model for Bennetts piano concertos has often been given as Mozart. In some ways this is not surprising. Bennett greatly admired Mozart; there are numerous stylistic elements of his music which point to Mozartian influence; and Bennett was himself a keen executant of Mozarts piano concertos which, during the 1830s, were performed more frequently than they had been in the years after their composers death. Nevertheless, the paradigm for the opening movement of Bennetts first piano concerto was not Mozart but the prevailing tendency of the London Piano School, many of whose most earnest exponents, such as Cramer, Moscheles and Potter, taught at the RAM. Smaller than the ritornello of Mozarts K466 in D minor, the opening orchestral introduction lasts only sixty-five bars, yet Bennett cleaved to the process of two distinct thematic ideas, with a third providing the coda material. The first idea, in D minor, is, as Geoffrey Bush has remarked, the D minor of Don Giovanni, and the bold gesture of the I-Vb progression that opens Bennetts ritornello is clearly reminiscent of the initial dramatic bars of Mozarts overture to his opera. In fact, Bennett seems to have exercised an obsession with D minor at this point in his education. His second symphony (WO23)which also shows symptoms of Don Giovanni and which was composed at much the same time as the first concertouses the same key for its outer movements, as does an overture (WO24) composed in October 1833. It also seems more than a coincidence that Cipriani Potters first surviving piano concerto, completed only two months after Bennetts work in December 1832 (and recorded on volume 72 of this series), should have been written in the same key. While the Don Giovanni idea dominates the first thirty bars of Bennetts ritornello, the second phase is taken up with a presentation of the second subject in F major. This entirely Classical idea, with its regular periodic structure, is firmly rooted in the relative major and it is only with a repetition of the melody that Bennett redirects the tonality back to D minor in preparation for the entry of the piano. At this juncture there is an unexpected interjection of the Neapolitan. Mozarts predilection for this chromatic inflection is well known, and Bennetts dramatic use of the harmony was probably a respectful gesture, but it could also have been down to Potters influence: a similar Neapolitan flourish (albeit more cadenza-like) occurs at the same point in the first movement of his own concerto in D minor. The presentation of Bennetts second subject also follows a traditional London procedure in that, after the statement of the lyrical material, a secondary phase gives rise to an exhibition of virtuoso technique from the soloist. This strategic thinkingimpressive for one so youngis continued in the recapitulation where the reprise of the first subject is taken entirely by the orchestra, thus throwing the restatement of the second subject in the tonic major into relief with the arrival of the piano.