Few of Dubois’s works have attained much staying power in the
active repertoire, but the 60
th volume of Hyperion’s
Romantic Piano Concerto edition restores three of them to the current
catalogue. That said, however, only the 1917 Suite for piano and string
orchestra is receiving its première recording. You can find, for
example, the Concerto-capriccioso with the Suite Concertante and the
Fantasiestücke for cello and orchestra on Mirare MIR141.
I wrote briefly about Dubois when reviewing his
Violin Concerto. The early 1876 Concerto-capriccioso
opens - unexpectedly - with a long cadenza, full of roulades and digital
demands. The accompanying orchestra fabric, when it eventually arrives, is
rather run-of-the-mill, and largely paragraphal, offering buttressed support
to the soloist but little of a more integrated function. Still, the piano is
the focus, and the solo writing is alternately agitated and dramatic and
extremely well laid out. That said, I’d have been tempted to be bold
and recast it as a solo concerto, and have been rid of the orchestra.
‘Very modern in style’ a contemporary critic opined of
the Piano Concerto No.2 of 1897. To me, though, it’s rather
Schumannesque in places but with hints too of Chopin and even Grieg with the
piano often offering a decorative gloss on things. The orchestral
accompaniment is, also, much more varied, some of it very lovely. The solo
writing is not especially virtuosic
per se, and that’s to its
advantage. The slow movement is quietly grave, opened by the piano, taken up
by the orchestra, and subsequently embellished by the piano. The vital,
energetic scherzo must owe a debt to Saint-Saëns, even taking on a
habañera contour at one point. The finale, in the solo cadenza that
launches it, strikes me as something of a Franck crib in places, though the
recapitulation of earlier thematic material is neatly done and again the
spirit of Saint-Saëns continues to haunt the work, usefully dampening
the somewhat half-hearted fugal passage. Academism is an ever-present worry
with Dubois but here it’s lightly conceived.
Through all these thickets and lyrical episodes Cédric
Tiberghien strides with great refinement and energy. So he does in the late
Suite, composed in 1917. It’s, as ever, a backward-looking opus, but
charmingly led by the piano; the string orchestra remaining subsidiary for
much of the length. The highlight is undoubtedly the lovely, lyrical slow
movement.
The performances throughout, from soloist and accompanists alike,
are warm, elegant and committed. The recording is finely balanced too. As
with the Violin Concerto, I can’t proclaim any of these three piano
works to be a marvel of invention, but they’re all engaging and
contain some delightful features.
Jonathan Woolf
Hype
rion
Romantic piano concertos: Review index
