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With Volume 48 of our groundbreaking Romantic Piano Concerto series we reach very uncharted territory indeed. Sir Julius Benedict has been all but forgotten today but he is yet another composer who gives the lie to the idea that Britain was ‘a land without music’ in the nineteenth century. Though born in Germany, Benedict settled in London in 1835, having already established a career as composer and pianist on the continent. He arrived in a city which had been the pianistic centre of Europe for the previous thirty years (though that role was shortly thereafter lost to Paris and the new generation of Romantic composers we remember today) and was soon performing his two concertinos in A flat and E flat, the latter work later being expanded into the E flat concerto recorded here. The C minor concerto was to follow in 1850. Both works are very much in the tradition of Hummel, of whom Benedict was a pupil, and combine brilliant virtuosity with an easy lyricism.
The even-more-forgotten Walter Macfarren was the brother of better-known George, an early Principal of the Royal Academy of Music. Walter was for many years a piano professor there, his pupils including Matthay and Henry Wood. His music is very much in the style of Mendelssohn and his Concertstück proves to be a very attractive work which could easily pass as one by the greater master.
2nd August 2009
“While Julius Benedict's two concertos are hardly profound, they burst with glittering opportunities for the pianist and heaps of charming melody, while Henry Wood's piano teacher, Walter Macfarren, produced a refined Mendelssohnian rhapsody in his Concertstück.”
26th July 2009
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“Neither of these concertos reaches profound regions, yet both contain arrestingly characterful and lovely things. Benedict’s aim is to dazzle his listeners with dashing brilliance, according to the ethos of the time. Walter Macfarren’s Concertstuck, his only surviving work for piano and orchestra, shows an easy gift for flowing melody. Shelley is a beguiling player of all of these — fresh, fluent, lucid, suave and never tempted to oversell.”
“Pianophiles and collectors of rarities will gravitate to this beautifully performed disc. It’s a tour-de-force of pianism-plus-directing from Howard Shelley”
“Howard Shelley, conducting from the keyboard, produces blistering accounts of the solo parts, and his Tasmanians play their hearts out. The recorded sound is fine, too. Recommended with every enthusiasm: 70 minutes of unalloyed pleasure”
