Cheap Piano Concerto (Music) (Antheil, Copland, Rische, Poppen) Price

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Customer Reviews of Piano Concerto

This CD from the German Arte Nova label continues their interest in 20th century music, with it containing four 1920s piano concertos played by the German pianist and academic Michael Rische. Rische is probably more famous for being the man who discovered previously lost piano concertos by Antheil and Schulhoff than for his playing itself, but this disc gives him an opportunity to show his pianistic abilities in a program that includes the Antheil work he rediscovered.

Indeed, the disc opens with Antheil's work. Written in 1922, four years before the work usually described as the Antheil Piano Concerto, this is a single-movement work lasting 20 minutes, written in a primarily rhythmic style. Largely based on the constant reiteration of a theme derived from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the concerto also makes detours towards boogie-woogie and to conventional virtuoso pianism. The orchestral part is unsophisticated and takes a largely subservient role to the rhythmic peregrinations of the piano. This isn't a major work, but Antheil fans will certainly want to hear it.

Rather stronger is Copland's two-movement piano concerto from 1926. The slow first movement counterpoints blues figurations against premonitions of the composer's later Americana style. It is succeded by a vigorously rhythmic finale distinctly related to the swing music of the era. Even though it is not a very subtle work, Copland's piano concerto is still a lot of fun.

Honegger's 1924 Concertino, lasting about ten minutes, is rather less jazz-inflected than the preceding works. It is in three movements that play without a break. A lively, neo-classical Allegro is followed by a lightly scored Larghetto, before the jazz influence reappears in the allegedly bluesy finale. If hardly the serious Honegger we know from the symphonies, this work still contains more than a few prefigurations of his mature style.

In contrast to its predecessors on the disc, Ravel's G major piano concerto is by now a bona fide classic. The first movement has a lyrical, jazz-inflected style and the finale is a brief presto, but the heart of the work is the weightless slow movement--one of Ravel's finest creations--where time almost seems to stand still.

This collection is worth considering, particularly at the price, but it's primarily valuable for Antheil fans as Rische's performances (particularly in the Ravel) are acceptable rather than inspired, and the orchestral contribution is mostly on a similar level.