I remember once hearing a performance of this concerto,
in Capetown in the early 1970s and being struck by the sheer magnitude
of the work, its Mahlerian length, its Lisztian (Faust Symphony)
choral finale with men’s voices, and the ferocious difficulty of the
solo part which reflects its composer’s pianistic virtuosity. It was
almost as much a feat of endurance for the audience to listen to the
work as it was for the soloist to play it. Endurance was the name of
the game. Thirty years later its remains a revelatory experience to
hear it again, in the more than capable hands of Marc-André Hamelin,
who clearly has the measure of its technical demands, expertly accompanied
by Mark Elder and the CBSO choral and orchestral forces. It was John
Ogdon, in turn inspired by Ronald Stevenson, who kept it alive after
the immediate successors to Busoni had passed on (among them Mark Hambourg
and Egon Petri, this latter giving the British premiere in 1909).
There are five movements each bearing a title, some
of them deceptively innocuous such as ‘Happy piece’ or ‘Sad piece’,
but it is more complex than that with the alternate first, middle and
last movements represented by Graeco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian
architecture respectively. The solo/orchestral relationship is quite
different from what one expects, much more equally defined and balanced
with the piano sometimes reversing role and accompanying the orchestra.
It is a work which almost seems to underscore the exhausted panoply
of Romantic harmony; it is time to move on after this culmination of
the Romantic concerto and it is indeed the summation of his youth and
he goes on to another musical language in his next works. The text for
the fifth movement, in which musical material heard during the preceding
hour is quoted, is a mystic hymn (sung in German by an invisible male
chorus) from a poem entitled Aladdin by the Dane Adam Oehlenschläger
(1779-1850), ‘Lift up your hearts to the Eternal Almighty, draw ye nigh
to Allah’.
This is a landmark disc of an epic, landmark concerto,
one of the finest in the Hyperion series.
Christopher Fifield
Hyperion
Romantic Piano Concerto Series
Marc-André Hamelin
(piano)