This morning I awakened to a sparkly, flashy, melody-filled piano concerto that I didn’t recognize — it sounded like a cross between Chopin (but much more expansive) and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (but without the Caribbean flavor) — which turned out to be by Friedrich / Frédéric Kalkbrenner (hereafter K): his Piano Concerto #4 in A Flat, Op. 127 (of 1835). K, a major figure of the transitional period between the late Classical music of Beethoven (1770 – 1827) and Schubert (1797 – 1829) and the early Romantic music of Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847) and Chopin (1810 – 1849) who was in fact admired by both Chopin and Gottschalk (1829 – 1869).
From Wikipedia:
Friedrich Wilhelm Michael Kalkbrenner (7 November 1784 – 10 June 1849), also known as Frédéric Kalkbrenner, was a pianist, composer, piano teacher and piano manufacturer. German by birth, Kalkbrenner studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, starting at a young age and eventually settled in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1849. Kalkbrenner composed more than 200 piano works, as well as many piano concertos and operas.
… It was not until the late 1830s that Kalkbrenner’s reputation was surpassed by the likes of Chopin, Thalberg and Liszt. Author of a famous method of piano playing (1831) which was in print until the late 19th century, he ran in Paris what is sometimes called a “factory for aspiring virtuosos” and taught scores of pupils from as far away as Cuba. His pupils included Marie Pleyel, Marie Schauff, and Camille-Marie Stamaty. Through Stamaty, Kalkbrenner’s piano method was passed on to Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Camille Saint-Saëns.
He was one of the few composers who through deft business deals became enormously rich. Chopin dedicated his first piano concerto to him.
Despite all this, you’ve probably never heard of K, or of Johann Nepomuk Hummel, or of Ignaz Moscheles, two other figures of this transitional period who, like K, were once really famous and then largely vanished from sight.
Performance notes. What my Apple Music was playing for me when I awoke was a Hyperion recording of Howard Shelley at the piano and also conducting the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. The concerto is in three movenents: 1 Maestoso brilliante, 2 Adagio, 3 Rondo: Allegro non troppo.
A earlier sparkly awakening. From my 12/15/16 posting “Ignaz Moscheles”:
A few days ago I awoke to the sound of really sparkly Schubert piano music. Well, not actually Schubert, but Ignaz Moscheles, a fascinating figure from the transition from high classicism to full-blown romanticism in music. A man of two musical worlds, devoted to the music of Beethoven but also close to Mendelssohn.
[from Wikipedia:] He was one of the leading virtuosi resident in Vienna during the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna and it was at this time that he wrote his enormously popular virtuosic Alexander Variations, Op. 32, for piano and orchestra, which he later played throughout Europe. Here too he became a close friend of Meyerbeer (at that time still a piano virtuoso, not yet a composer) and their extemporized piano-duets were highly acclaimed. Moscheles was also familiar with Hummel and Kalkbrenner. Among the virtuosi of the 1820s, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Cramer, Herz and Weber were his most famous rivals.
His music is showy, virtuosic, and, well, lots of fun. You can watch a performance of his Grand Duo for 2 pianos, 8 hands [on YouTube]
Once more with K and Hummel et al. From my 11/20/14 posting “Muzio Clementi”, about a contemporary of Beethoven’s (Clementi’s dates are 1752 – 1832), this Wikipedia bit:
Influenced by Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord school and Haydn’s classical school and by the stile galante of Johann Christian Bach and Ignazio Cirri, Clementi developed a fluent and technical legato style, which he passed on to a generation of pianists, including John Field, Johann Baptist Cramer, Ignaz Moscheles, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Carl Czerny. He was a notable influence on Ludwig van Beethoven.
Obviously, I’ll need to blog on Hummel one of these days. There’s a lot of stuff in the early 19th century.
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