Carl CZERNY (1791-1857)
Der Pianist im Klassischen Style Op. 856 (1857)
48 Preludes and Fugues [133:26]
Emanuele Delucchi (piano)
rec. 28-29 August 2020, Varese Liguri (SP), Italy.
PIANO CLASSICS PCL10204 [69:55 + 63:31]
We tend to imagine that J.S. Bach’s music, having fallen out of fashion even before his death, was pretty much ignored by the wider world until relatively recently. There is however no shortage of composers who were entirely aware of his genius, and we can certainly add Carl Czerny to their number. The Well-Tempered Clavier was very much in use as pedagogical material, and the young Carl would have studied those preludes and fugues closely while being tutored by his father. Czerny worked up to his Op. 856 with collections including Die Kunst der Präludierens (review), and a Schule des Fugenspiels Op. 400 with 12 Preludes and Fugues. Czerny’s Nouveau Gradus ad Parnassum followed on from Clementi and also includes fugues, and Der Pianist im Klassischen Style was dedicated to Liszt and represents his summit in this old-fashioned but unavoidably significant genre.
Luca Chierici’s booklet notes for this release tell us that there is little if any written evidence on how the publication of Der Pianist im Klassischen Style was received by critics, or indeed by Liszt, who had been a childhood pupil of Czerny’s and held him in affectionate esteem. Robert Schumann had criticised Czerny’s Op. 400 fugues, and some of the technical aspects considered weak in this regard re-emerge in Op. 856, though Czerny went further in integrating his fugues with a more up-to-date ‘galant’ style in his music. These fugues are ‘classical’ in the sense that they employ established counterpoint devices such as augmentation and diminution, but in general they are a cheerful mashup between Bach and Czerny’s idiom of classical poise and the use of occasional piquant chromaticism. As with the Well-Tempered Clavier each fugue is fronted by a prelude, and these have even greater diversity of character, ranging from Schubert, Schumann or Chopin-like romantic charm to exercises in counterpoint in their own right. The fugues inevitably present homages to Bach and Handel, but Czerny’s restless creativity takes them much further than mere imitation, and this is much of the fascination in this collection. Fugues that open with austere Bach-sounding thematic material develop in all kinds of directions - by no means in terms of uneasy eccentricity, but in a kind of free-ranging sense of musical exploration, an idea of ‘how far can I take this?’ Czerny never loses the plot in a fugue, but his plots thicken, keeping us engaged and often raising an eyebrow with wonder; a feeling of ‘how on earth did he get here..?’
Emanuele Delucchi plays with confident skill and quite considerable panache, gliding through technically demanding thickets of notes with apparent ease and only a very few splashy notes, and also avoiding over-egging the expressive side of things without leaving us feeling short-changed. The instrument chosen for the recording is an 1853 Pleyel which provides authentic period colour, but this would be my only criticism of this release, and that is that this colour tends towards the monochrome. After a period of listening I found myself wishing this had been recorded on a more modern instrument: one that had a few more levels of dynamic contrast, and that could have projected a little more clarity of line through the counterpoint. This is not to say that anything in this recording or performance is unclear, and this instrument is by no means hair-shirt or unpleasant to listen to. Having become used to Bach on, for instance, a Fazioli grand, one becomes used to contrapuntal voices being defined by more distinctive subtleties of tone and timbre as well as volume, and I miss that a little bit here. The recording has been made in a relatively confined acoustic, which is fine and much better than anything too swampy, but the atmosphere is more one-to-one than concert-hall. The only other recording I could find anywhere of this opus is one with Claudio Colombo which appears to be download-only. From what I was able to sample this is played on a modern instrument and seems decent enough, though from what I could hear did seem strangely uninvolving. Given the choice I would certainly throw in my lot with the more committed sounding Emanuele Delucchi despite my mild reservations with regard to the period instrument.
Dominy Clements
