Amongst
the casualties of the Romantic era, Norbert Burgmüller, contemporary of
Mendelssohn and Chopin, is now little remembered. He suffered ill
health. A doomed love affair seems to have led to epilepsy, from which
he died in 1836, whilst trying to alleviate his condition in the spa in
Aachen. It was no less a figure than Robert Schumann who wrote that,
after the death of Schubert, no musical loss had been more grievous.
His two symphonies have already been released by Carus. They now turn
to the rest of his orchestral music, of which little survives. The
operatic fragment Dionys
does not survive, but its overture does. Twelve minutes in length it’s
cut from Weberian cloth. Opening portentously it develops a strong
sense of atmosphere and romantic expression. Burgmüller handles his
horns and winds with acumen and laces the music with a good sense of
panache and no little style. It’s a pity that he struggled with the
text of the opera, which he deemed poor, and which was the principal
reason the work was never finished. The overture is highly proficient,
and good enough for Mendelssohn to have performed in concert.
The Piano Concerto, composed earlier, is his Op.1. Completed in 1829,
it’s cast in the three expected movements. It has the distinction,
apparently, of being the first piano concerto to sport trombones. It’s
written in F sharp minor, a quite unusual key. These pointers are
enough to suggest an individuality of spirit and a lack of conformity.
Those hopes are not wholly met but it is certainly a concerto worth
getting to know. The piano steals in after the orchestral introduction.
A contemporary critic wrote of the work as a ‘strange symphonic poem
full of sumptuous, wild geniality’. This presumably alludes to the role
allocated to the orchestra, both in general and in specific localised
incidents such as the unusual cello solo in the slow movement. The
cello plays deft figuration whilst the piano pirouettes around him. The
cello solo should not be taken as a precursor of that in Brahms’ second
concerto; it serves a wholly different function, but it is unusual
enough to note its presence, and it represents another example of the
composer’s questing imagination as to form and function. The confident
handling of the finale is exemplified by the exchanges between piano
and orchestra and drama is built up and sustained to the very end,
where the percussion beats out a triumphant tattoo.
The Op.17 Entr’actes, of which there are four, date to 1827-28. It’s
unclear as to whether these were intended for specific staged works or
plays at the Kassel Court Theatre. Nevertheless these show the composer
at his most lyrically unbuttoned and orchestrally deft. The wind
writing is especially cherishable and there’s winsome charm in the
second of the four, a lovely scherzo; hints of Schubert here. Both the
concluding Andantinos are eventful and enshrine plenty of
characterisation.
The soloist in the concerto is Tobias Koch who plays a Viennese
Bösendorfer dating from 1849. Its use is interesting, not least because
an attempt is being made to bind the solo with the orchestral writing
in a dialogue that denotes integration not opposition. That’s also made
easier by virtue of the size of the Hofkapelle Stuttgart under their
director Frieder Bernius: 7-6-5-4-2 for the strings, which gives an
idea that the Bösendorfer is cast with, not against, the accompaniment,
though the band plays modern instruments. The performances, as a
result, are most sympathetic to the idiom.
Jonathan Woolf
