Plowright gives a Czech composer a fair Suk of the sauce bottle.

English pianist Jonathan Plowright continues to stake his claim for recording the modern benchmark set of Brahms piano works with this fourth volume in BIS’s superlative series. This despite stiff competition from Irishman Barry Douglas, who has already completed his six-volume set for Chandos and the redoubtable Paul Lewis who coupled the Four Ballades with his recent five-star reading of the First Piano Concerto. The difference in approach between Plowright and Douglas is no better demonstrated than in the third Intermezzo from the Piano Pieces Op. 119. It’s marked grazioso e giocoso and Plowright dispatches it with infectious high spirits in 1’15’’ while Douglas chooses more grace than jocularity with a generous 1’51’’. Plowright bookends this latest programme with the first and second sets of the 30 Paganini Variations. Played straight through they are tedious for listener and performer alike, but Plowright’s solution is a fine one. He plays the other works – the Ballades, Rhapsodies and Piano Pieces Op. 119 – in their original groupings whereas the adventurous Douglas seasons a set of Cappricios with a single Ballade or Intermezzo. So, very different approaches from two very different performers. Ultimately the choice will be yours. If you can… Continue…

You never know what you’ll get when a label releases music by unknown composers. Here the Szymanowski’s and Plowright bring us piano quintets by two Poles plucked from the relative obscurity of the early 20th century. At a time when trailblazers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg were making their modernist mark, many others were remaining faithful to the good old ways of 19th-century Romanticism. Ludomir Różycki and Ignaz Friedman are two such late, Late-Romantics. First up on the disc, Różycki’s Quintet is a wonderful find. Its opening movement has a brooding, romantic character, marked by dramatic swells with gentle hints at the French impressionist sound that had also inspired his more famous compatriot and the quartet’s namesake. The second movement is more solemn, with a greater sense of darkness and melancholy. Plowright and the Quartet are in perfect synchronicity here, elegantly capturing the Adagio’s various moods, particularly cellist Marcin Sieniawski in his impassioned solos. The third movement is perhaps the freshest sounding, having some of the effervescent character of Ravel’s String Quartet second movement. Ignaz Friedman was a pianist-composer with an Australian connection. As a Jew during Nazi-occupied Poland,… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

With this issue we get to No 59 in Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series. That’s an awful lot of concertos, and although the series has included Saint-Säens and Rachmaninov, the vast majority of works have been obscure, neglected or (in the current case) completely unknown. The two Polish composers represented here were musicians of local reputation: highly capable but not notably individual. Aleksander Zarzycki was the older (1843-1898). His Grande Polonaise was composed in 1859, and while it has quiet sections and even a passage that sounds like French operetta, its basic aim is to imitate Chopin – for political as much as musical reasons. Chopin remains inimitable, however, and the piece comes over as a Polish imitation of Liszt. Zarzycki’s later Piano Concerto is a compendium of mid-century Romantic gestures, expertly assembled, but it lacks a true memorability that would set it apart. Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921) is slightly better known (though I must confess not to me). His Piano Concerto of 1903, a sprawling work in three movements, shows a sophisticated harmonic and orchestral palette. While possibly overwritten, it contains several individual episodes, like the first movement’s coda in Straussian waltz time… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per…

The image of heavyweight composer and patriarchal guardian of a decaying romantic tradition makes it easy to forget that Brahms started out as a virtuoso concert pianist. It is equally easy to forget that his third and final sonata, for his own instrument, was completed at the ridiculously precocious age of 20 (during a sojourn with his new friends Robert and Clara Schumann). From then on it was as if he had said all that he wanted to say in the genre, and his large scale piano compositions were henceforth confined to sets of variations – those on themes of Paganini and Handel being the most substantial. For his ambitious (and auspicious) debut on the BIS label, the British pianist Jonathan Plowright exhibits a prodigious musical appetite, tackling the meaty Third Sonata for his main course with the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel making for a rich and sumptuous dessert. The sonata again confounds any expectations you might have of Brahms as a structural conservative, being cast in no less than five contrasting movements, linked with a recognisably Beethovian thematic motto. It receives a carefully considered yet intensely dramatised reading, more tempestuous in approach than, say Radu…

In 19th-century Poland, composers faced a real dilemma. The country had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria, super-powers with a vested interest in keeping nationalistic music firmly out of the public domain. That left
 you two options. The first was 
to become a composer-virtuoso (the path taken by Paderewski along the way to becoming Polish Prime Minister) so you might be able to export your music to an international audience. Juliusz Zarębski (1854-85), complete with flamboyant shock of hair, was one such showman, gaining a European reputation for his performances on a double keyboard piano. The other possibility was to stay at home and teach, the sedate choice of Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921). These two gentlemen of two roads diverg’d are the subjects of this fascinating disc from Hyperion. Zarębski’s Piano Quintet, a 40-minute work as rich in melody as it is strong on motivic development, was heard in Martha Argerich’s impassioned 2011 Lugano Festival release. The composer was clearly something of an innovator, employing bold tonal shifts and quirky rhythmic devices. The 
 Żeleński Piano Quartet is entirely new to CD but should make many friends on this showing: as tuneful as the Zarębski but with an added layer……