Sviatoslav Richter (piano)
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Charles Munch (conductor)
1Â Allegro con brio
2Ìý³¢²¹°ù²µ´Ç
3Â Rondo: Allegro scherzando
Beethoven arrived in Vienna from Bonn in November 1792, primarily hoping to make his name as a piano virtuoso, although he had brought with him reams of youthful compositions and intended to study with Haydn.
A brilliant improviser at the piano, he gained many admirers for his ability to shock, and to mock the fashionable galant style. His improvisatory élan is evident from many of the smaller piano works he composed, especially the Bagatelles that litter his career; the apotheosis of this comes in the monumental Diabelli Variations, his last large-scale piano work.
At this early stage in his career, Beethoven thrilled small audiences mainly in their own drawing-rooms and in the salons of Vienna; but he soon got a chance to exercise his virtuosity before a larger audience at a charity concert at the Burgtheater in March 1795. The work he played there was a piano concerto – the B flat work that would be published as his Second Piano Concerto in 1801. This work, started in about 1788, followed a much earlier concerto, composed when Beethoven was 14, which only survives (as WoO 4) in piano score. So the C major First Piano Concerto, composed in 1795, is not in fact Beethoven’s first piano concerto, and neither is it his second! It is only due to being published slightly before the Second that it became numbered as the First.
Beethoven wrote to his publisher, Franz Anton Hoffmeister, in January 1801 saying that ‘I am valuing the [Second] Concerto at only 10 ducats because … I do not consider it to be one of my best concertos’ – and indeed, despite its genial, Mozartian nature, the Second’s inspiration does not seem to soar as it might, possibly due to the apprentice nature of the work, and the countless revisions Beethoven made to it in the 13 years between composition and publication. The First, however, while tapping a similar Mozartian vein, shows far more evidence of Beethoven’s developing maturity. He was the soloist in the work at its first performance, in Prague in October 1798, in a visit during which he also performed the Second Concerto and gave a private recital.
The First Concerto opens quietly, with a rising octave figure – seemingly simple, but ripe for development at points throughout the first movement. Beethoven combines the symphonic inevitability innate to his own style with moments of Mozart’s opera buffa style. Indeed, the precedent for the movement seems to be Mozart’s antepenultimate piano concerto, K503 in C major – complete with a ‘martial’ theme in the trumpets and horns (heard in the woodwind when it does not fit the notes available on natural brass instruments), reminiscent of the Marseillaise-like theme in the Mozart.
The A flat major slow movement, strikingly, omits the flutes and oboes (as well as the trumpets and drums), giving much of the melodic interplay to the piano and the clarinet; interestingly, the luscious effect of combined clarinets, bassoons and horns in flat keys was one of which Mozart was especially fond. The finale is a spirited, humorous rondo; some of its music is developed from an unpublished piano trio Beethoven had composed in 1791. The fecundity of invention in its bouncing themes is matched by the skilful harmonic hoops through which they are made to jump. The movement is ingeniously extended – never breathless, and always renewing itself where a lesser composer might have ended it; never outstaying its welcome.
Programme note by David A. Threasher © Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú
