 |
 |
|
 |
And Czerny writes his piano concertos... | |
|
Czerny's piano concertos John Field, the composer, had a nickname for Carl Czerny, the famous pupil of Beethoven and piano teacher of young Franz Liszt: inkpot! It is a fact that the music production of Carl Czerny was astonishingly abundant (more than 1000 works, de facto, treating all genres of music except Opera). Well before Ford Motors, he adopted a peculiar and bizarre way of composing music, a sort of music factory chain or pipeline built around a set of four music desks, he used to compose 4 works at a time in a sort of mechanical rotation system. Unfortunately, such system of work became a problem for his own composer, since among works of lesser quality (so to say, but always useful for the piano technique), there are very good works, which deserve a better wider knowledge. Among them the Series of 5 piano concertos left by Czerny. And among them, in particular, the Piano Concertos Op. 28 and Op. 214, chosen by H. Shelley for his marvellous best seller CD Album. The Piano Concerto Op. 28 is a somewhat mysterious piece, since it sounds as the arrangement for piano and orchestra of the Guitar Concerto No. 3 Op. 70 by Mauro Giuliani (we are still talking of people who lived and worked around Beethoven in Vienna). Nonetheless the two concerts appeared in the same period and any historical scrutiny did not manage to crearly establish who wrote first, Giuliani or Czerny. Czerny's piano style Great pedagogue and great piano technique master, Czerny wrote and published more than 12 major collections of music exercises of any kind, more than 5 major handbooks for learning the art of piano playing and of piano composition (the Series of the Pianoforteschule), and edited and published the new editions and the German translations of the 4 volumes on Music Composition by Reicha (1834) and the various famous Klavierschule works by G.S.Löhlein and J.Pleyel. And it is a fact that the piano parts of his Piano Concertos and of the Rondo brillant Op. 233 are seriously demanding and a pianist, who had not a great command of every aspects of his piano technique, would be in great difficulty in properly treating and interpreting Czerny's music. The influence of his music teachers and mentors are clearly evident in his style, in particular Clementi, Hummel and Beethoven (and also Weber). Nonetheless, certain aspects of Czerny's music and style, instead, already look at the second part of the Romantic Era and, despite his (as far as we know from some anecdotes) apparent disapproval of Chopin and of Chopin's curriculum as a music student, Czerny's works of 1820s further developed the atmospheres created by the Nocturnes by John Field some time before Chopin himself. And, apart from the 1820s pre-Chopin parts that can be found already in Czerny's Piano Concerto Op. 28 (when Chopin was 10 years old, more or less), it would be a great idea to listen also to another lesser known but beautiful series of compositions by Czerny... his own Nocturnes for piano solo. __________________ |
||
|
C. Czerny, Piano Concertos Op. 28, Op. 214, Rondo Op. 233: SCORE Piano Concerto Op. 28 in F major (http://imslp.org) Piano Concerto Op. 214 in A minor (http://imslp.org) RECORDING Howard Shelley, Piano Czerny: Piano Concertos Op. 28, Op. 214, Rondo Op. 233 - Hyperion |
||
|
MozartCircle S. & L.M. Jennarelli |
||
 |