The
undeniable privilege of having been both a pupil and a friend
of Beethoven carried it with it equally undeniable burdens -
apart from the difficulties of Beethoven’s personality. This
must have been an especial burden for those who had ambitions
as composers in their own right. One was always likely to be
regarded as of interest primarily – or even solely – for the
tales one might have to tell about the master, special insights
to offer. One’s own music was all too likely to be dismissed
as merely a diluted version of the master’s. As a creative individual
one might feel totally dominated, altogether overshadowed and
inhibited by the genius one had known at close quarters, to
be a victim of what, in literary circles, the critic Harold
Bloom has famously called “the anxiety of influence”.
Ferdinand
Ries’s father, Franz Anton Ries was his earliest teacher and
was himself a friend of Beethoven. Brought up in Bonn, Ferdinand
Ries went to Munich, and then Vienna, in 1801. Beethoven helped
the impecunious young man between 1801 and 1804, Ries working
as a kind of secretary and copyist to the great man. He also
studied with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. He went on to a successful
career as a pianist and composer which took him to many parts
of Europe, including some eleven years spent in London. In later
years Beethoven thought rather less well of Ries, possibly because,
in 1808, Ries obtained an appointment that Beethoven himself
wanted. Beethoven reportedly observed of Ries that “his compositions
imitate me too much”. The remark – made out of anger - has set
the tone for many later judgements. In 1838 Ries published -
with Franz Wegeler - Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van
Beethoven. The very real interest and value of these biographical
notes has, ironically, served to distract attention, until recently
at least, from Ries’s own music.
Ries’s
admiration of Beethoven endured; he often performed Beethoven’s
music; he made arrangements of a number of Beethoven’s works,
including a string quartet arrangement of Beethoven’s Piano
Sonata No. 15 (‘Pastoral’) and a string quintet arrangement
of Beethoven’s Second Symphony; during Ries’s years in London
he was in large part responsible for obtaining for Beethoven
the commission which resulted in the Ninth Symphony. It would
have been strange indeed if there were not reminiscences of
Beethoven occasionally to be heard in his own music. But his
best music is far more than Beethoven and water; he seems never
to have been a victim of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” and,
sensibly, not to have aspired to write music of so great a spiritual
weight as that of Beethoven, preferring to find ways of being
true to himself.
These
are world première recordings of two of Ries’s eight piano concertos.
The earlier, written shortly after Ries’s years with Beethoven
does at times sound a little like the master, especially in
some of the orchestral writing; but the resemblances are neither
surprising nor in any way limiting. The keyboard writing is
more like Hummel, as Allan Badley suggests in the booklet notes,
than Beethoven. At times one is reminded of Clementi. Ries,
in short, was heir to a whole tradition, not just to one composer,
however great. He has a gift for melodic invention and some
of the more ornate passages surely reflect his own virtuoso
skills as a pianist. The central movement – marked larghetto
quasi andante – is particularly charming. The A flat concerto,
composed some twenty years later, shows us a composer working
in an idiom which has a grandeur of its own, and which is in
no way reliant on recollections of Beethoven. This is a fine,
eloquent concerto, a musical tribute to the Rhine; the first
and second movements are relaxed and broad, the third more insistently
energetic, some of the writing for the soloist making considerable
technical demands.
Soloist,
orchestra, conductor and recording quality are all beyond reproach.
The young Austrian, Christopher Hinterhuber, displays a mature
understanding of the traditions out of which Ries’s music grows
and is quite unphased by the more bravura passages. He finds
wholly sympathetic partners in The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
and Uwe Grodd. This CD, I am pleased to report, is announced
as the first volume in a projected series of the composer’s
complete works for piano and orchestra. If its successors are
as good as this, the series will introduce us to a lot of very
attractive music.
Glyn Pursglove
see also Review
by Colin Clarke January
Bargain of the Month
Christopher Hinterhuber (piano)
