Czerny: Symphony No. 2, Op. 781

Carl Czerny is known to millions of piano students who have struggled to come to grips with his piano exercises/compositions. His vast opus contains some real gems. One such jewel is the Concerto for Four-Handed Piano and Orchestra. This work demonstrates, as does Czerny's splendid Second Symphony, that he was not simply a phrase churner but a true composer.

For generations, the mere mention of the name “Carl Czerny” evoked images of reams of piano exercises, etudes and vacuous piano scales. To say that Carl Czerny was a highly prolific composer does not begin to describe the staggering quantity and diversity of his compositional output. A list of Czerny’s published works occupies 22 pages of small type, at the end of which his London publisher, Robert Cocks & Co., apologizes that "many other arrangements exist by the talented author of this work, of which even the titles have escaped his memory." It includes 861 published opus numbers (?!?) plus a great deal of unpublished material, including 4 Symphonies (in addition to two published Symphonies), 30 String Quartets and innumerable religious works for voices and orchestra.

Despite his amazingly prolific output, it is fair to say that Czerny evidently did not aim to be »original« at all. His compositional work method produced music going back and forth stylistically between Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and other contemporaries with amazing flexibility and lack of self-consciousness. It is this very stylistic flexibility that gives these two symphonies their unique charm and justify resquing the amazing Czerny’s “serious” concert music for the long neglect it has suffered for so many years.