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Dvorák Piano Concerto (original version) SCHOENFIELD Piano Concerto (Four Parables) Andreas Boyde with Freiburg Philharmonic Orchestra cond. Johannes Fritzch (Dvorák) and Dresdner Sinfoniker cond. Jonathan Nott (Schoenfield) Athene Minerva ATH CD21, 70 mins

 


Crotchet



Dvorák`s Piano Concerto is worth getting to know. While this is a personal opinion, and I can offer no evidence to support the claim, I believe this very attractive piece reveals the true character and personality of Dvorák. It dates from 1876. Ten years earlier he had composed his song cycle Cypress Trees written at the disappointment he felt over a girl he loved marrying someone else. Later, Dvorák was to marry her sister and this concerto is a sunny work which has a felicity reminiscent of Mendelssohn. Michael Kennedy asserts that Dvorák had a Schubertian gift for melody ... where does he obtain these odd ideas? Dvorák`s gift of melody owes more to Bohemian folk music and the grace of Mozart but also to his natural melodic gift which was entirely his.

There is an admirable simplicity about this concerto. That does not mean it is easy to play. What is also admirable is that Dvorák was not a pianist and one might expect his concerto to be as duff as, for example, the one by Vaughan Williams. But it isn't. It is a good and very satisfying piece.

Andreas Boyde's performance is both very exciting and gloriously effective. This technique is unquestionable and now we have evidence of a true lyricism. He is a pianist with steel fingers and a warm heart.. Every bit a complete musician. The slow movement reminded me of the Krommers and the Bendas with that wonderful mid-European clarity and rustic delight ... certainly not Schubert. Dvorák's clear textures are a constant joy. There is a beauty and stillness in this music which Boyde captures to perfection. The finale is also very well realised.

Paul Schoenfields Four Parables is a tour de farce for any pianist. This is brilliant, sleazy, jazzy, vaudeville music but of the highest quality. So good is it that it makes George Gershwin sound like an amateur. What joyful, witty and totally absorbing music this is. You must read the accompanying booklet to discover the intriguing subject matter of the four movements, Unashamed foot tapping material as well as an elegy of great conviction.

As for the piano playing, one can only exclaim astonishment and admiration. It is a sensational success.

The recording is exemplary

Reviewer

David Wright

Performances

Recording

and another view from Peter Grahame Woolf

Dvorák's early piano concerto is written off in New Grove with one dismissive sentence. I have quite enjoyed its occasional airings, but never so much as in Andreas Boyde's 1994 live recording from a Freiburg concert with a very sympathetic conductor. It is criticised for not being overtly virtuosic, but its pianistic difficulties have militated against frequent performances. There is a haunting slow movement played with a touching inwardness, and the final allegro con fuoco has a pre-echo of the Symphonic Variations of a decade later, which for me would have been a preferable coupling.

However, this CD is devised as a showcase for Andreas Boyde, whose recording of Tchaikovsky's 2nd concerto, with the same orchestra and conductor, I had previously admired (Athene ATH CD16). Paul Schoenfield, an Arizona graduate, started composing at 7 and wrote this programmatic concerto in the early 1980s when he was about 35. It is a light-weight piece of virtuosic writing in a tonal idiom with popular references, and suits Andreas Boyde's confident, extravert style of pianism, captured in a 1998 concert in Dresden. The four movements are conceived as parables about American life. We meet a quadriplegic murderer (not as sinister as you might expect); an Alzheimer victim reflecting on his once vigorous past; an elegy for an acquaintance who, because of religious fanaticism, died without medical help, and a story about a jazz club in a Dog Heaven, which the composer had made up to console some children whose mother had got rid of the family pet! Pleasant but forgettable mainstream music, wholly derivative, brash and ultimately meretricious. Others who prefer late 20th century music to be nearer the 19th than the 21st will certainly disagree, and the Schoenfield concerto will give pleasure to those who like their new music to be not too challenging.

The piano is balanced well forward in the Schoenfield, as is the common way with piano concertos on CD; much more natural in the Dvorák. It is, anyhow, well worth buying for the Dvorák alone and, with his London connections and an English record company, I am eager to have an opportunity to review Andreas Boyde live in concert for Seen & Heard

Reviewer

Peter Grahame Woolf

In addition

I was so taken with the companion work on this disc with its Bartok/Bernstein/Ibert influences that I asked Rob Barnett to give it a special hearing. LM

PAUL SCHOENFIELD Piano Concerto Four Parables (1983) 28.50

This concerto is in a mildly challenging jazzy idiom, not at all bland, rattling and shuddering with feeling and display. It is a spicily apposite and happily disconcerting stable-mate for the Dvorák and we should be grateful to Athene for their brave spirit in coupling the two works.

The four parables are macabre 'twilight zone' fables. The first movement's sleepy tension is redolent of Shostakovich 8 with Hebraic cross-currents but this is soon cast aside in a jazzy tumbling onslaught the twin, in character, with Peter Mennins Piano Concerto. Senility's Ride (II) is a dream dance - sheets of shot silk and slews of fog evolving into smoochy speakeasy dances winding through a smoky phantasm. A jazzy rumpus erupts - all Gershwin and Arnold. In fact the inspiration for some of this may well have been Arnold's Concerto for Phyllis and Cyril with a similar level of taste collapse.

The Elegy (III) is written for someone whose religious fanaticism denied himself medical attention and died young. The minor key miasma is not at all bluesy. Instead we get the most avant-garde of the four movements with disconnected rhapsodising, drum-taps and battering possessed anger. The finale (Dog Heaven) is a crazy side-walk ragtime with dashes of Mozart 'walking the dog' all topped off with a chaotic feral shindig met with uproarious applause. This is a work of gutsy collage-like exuberance and Boyde and the Dresden orchestra are all willing spurs and riders.

Reviewer

Rob Barnett

Visit
Athene



see compilation of reviews here

Reviewer

David Wright

Performances

Recording

Peter Grahame Woolf



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