Julius RÖNTGEN (1865-1932)
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor (1888) [34:01]
Piano Concerto No. 6 in E minor (1929) [17:16]
Piano Concerto No. 7 in C major (1929) [18:36]
Oliver Triendl (piano)
Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra/Hermann Bäumer
rec. Kristiansand, Kilden, Norway, 2017
CPO 555 055-2 [70:16]
Gone are the days when Röntgen was merely a name and no note of his music was widely known. CPO is certainly not the only label to devote time and expertise to recording his music, and this has enabled listeners to get to grips with his concertos as much as his music for solo piano.
These three concertos are separated by many years. To be strictly accurate the large-scale Third dates from 1887 and the Sixth and Seventh – which are said to form kind of Siamese twin relationship – were written in 1929-30. The 1887 Concerto owes in genesis in part to the death of a close friend. Its ethos is richly saturated in Dvořák and Brahms. The piano pitches straight in and whilst Brahms is a constant lodestar for Rontgen, his means here are altogether lighter, his orchestration more classically aligned. The indefatigable Oliver Triendl locates the essentially good-natured songfulness at the heart of Röntgen’s conception, enjoying too its more dramatic moments. The second movement is rather folkloric – he had been listening to Dvořák’s chamber music at the time of composition – and there are Bohemian dance intimations. This is followed by a lovely romance – direct, unaffected, and eloquent – and with rolled chords to end and an avuncular finale complete with ‘heroic’ peroration.
If this concerto seems cut from conventional cloth, the later works are rather more challenging. Rontgen himself felt them to be twins, each representing a side of the concerto coin – one a fantasy and the other a more conventional late-Romantic affair. It was his idea for him to premiere them both at a Concertgebouw performance with Mengelberg conducting – they had long had a non-speaking relationship – soon after the ink had dried. They are both compact works, together lasting as long as the Third Concerto. No.6 is cast in one movement with erudite note writer Jurjen Vis adding that it has a 15-minute duration (Treindl and Bäumer take over 17 minutes, if you’re counting with a stopwatch). Its structure does sound rhapsodic – bitty, if you’re unsympathetic – but there is a strong cadenza and trademark lyricism and a delicate end, once past a frisson of bitonality earlier on. The Seventh Concerto is cast in a solid three-movement structure and is much more conventional. Avuncular and extrovert it calls on a solo cello in the central movement (shades of Brahms’s B flat major Concerto, perhaps?) and there’s plenty of folk-like material to enjoy and limpid decorative writing. Similarly, there’s a genial Romanza to conclude.
These astute performances, finely recorded and documented, judge the temper and temperature of the three concertos to perfection. The result is personable, light, deft and charming: no mountain-top assaults or cries de profundis.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: Rob Barnett
