PIANO ENCORES BACH MOZART GRAINGER RUBINSTEIN GERSHWIN AND MORE Dennis Hennig
PIANO ENCORES JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH 1685-1750 (arr. Carl Tausig 1841-1871) 1 Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV565 7 17 SIGISMUND THALBERG 1812-1871 2 Air Anglais Varié (Home! Sweet Home!) as performed by Miss Arabella Goddard 5 34 THEODOR LESCHETIZKY 1830-1915 3 Andante Finale for the left hand, Op. 13 (paraphrase from Donizetti s Lucia di Lammermoor ) 4 28 TERESA CARREÑO 1853-1917 4 Little Waltz 3 25 MORITZ MOSZKOWSKI 1854-1925 5 Concert Waltz as recorded by Eileen Joyce 7 37 JOACHIM RAFF 1822-1882 6 La Fileuse 3 36 ANTON RUBINSTEIN 1829-1894 7 Melody in F, Op. 3 No. 2 4 19 8 Trot de cavalerie 3 26 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART 1756-1791 (trans. Wilhelm Backhaus 1884-1969) 9 Serenade from Don Giovanni 3 09 2
PERCY GRAINGER 1882-1961 0 Ramble on the Last Love Duet in Der Rosenkavalier 7 26 R. NATHANIEL DETT 1882-1943! Dance (Juba) from In the Bottoms as played by the world-renowned pianist Percy Grainger 2 13 DAVID GUION 1892-1981 @ The Harmonica-Player from Alley Tunes (Three Themes from the South) 2 15 GEORGE GERSHWIN 1898-1937 (arr. Percy Grainger) Love Walked In 3 56 $ The Man I Love 2 56 ALFRED GRÜNFELD 1852-1924 % Soirée de Vienne, Op. 56 Concert Paraphrase on Johann Strauss Waltz-Motives from Die Fledermaus and Others 6 07 Dennis Hennig piano 3
Pianos and piano players held a dominant role in musical life throughout the 19th century and well into our own. Most of our living rooms contained a piano and there would have been no shortage of people, with various degrees of skill, to play it. Little wonder that the public flocked to hear pianists, nor that these pianists adopted particular mannerisms and personalities to distinguish them from their rivals. Their personalities would also be imprinted upon their playing. A concert by Moszkowski would not sound like Leschetizky any more than it would sound like Grainger. One of the ways they emphasised their respective personalities was by the inclusion of characteristic pieces, often created by themselves, which audiences would not expect to hear on anyone else s programs. These personal touches, so much a feature of piano playing over the last 150 years, have come to be seen as indulgences inappropriate to serious music-making. The works on this recording once featured on the programs of some of the greatest pianists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of them were published or sold under licence by long-established Australian music sellers such as Allan and Co. and Palings, and much of the sheet music from which this recording is played was collected over several years from second-hand music shops around Australia. Here was music which fascinated several generations of Australians on the pianos in living rooms from Rockhampton to Bendigo, from Adelaide to Lismore. Now that stereo systems have effectively replaced the family piano, such pieces have lost their social relevance. No longer do families sit around a piano after dinner while someone does a Trot de cavalerie or attempts to emulate Eileen Joyce s rendition of Moszkowski s famous Concert Waltz in E. It seems apt that the medium which has done much to bring about the demise of this pianistic repertoire should be used to preserve a part of it. Rather than dismissing them as lapses in musical taste, why not temporarily put aside our musical austerity and indulge in a pianistic peccadillo or two? Harold Schonberg (in The Great Pianists) claimed that at the turn of the century it seemed to be against the law to open a piano recital without Carl Tausig s arrangement of JS Bach s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV565. Tausig himself had little time to promote it since he died at the age of 29. Few pianists could or would ever match the precocity of this incredible rascal whom Liszt 4
claimed to be beyond lessons at the age of 14 and who had established an internationally recognised Academy for Advanced Piano Playing at 24. Five years later, in 1871, Tausig retired from the Academy and was about to embark upon a concert career in America when he contracted typhoid. Most of his creations for piano were arrangements of works by others. Owing to their inordinate difficulties, few of them were commercially successful or widely published, other than this arrangement, his concert arrangement of Schubert s Marche militaire and his three Valses-Caprices (Nouvelles Soirées de Vienne) on themes by Johann Strauss II. Sigismund Thalberg was Liszt s most serious rival during the 1830s and 1840s. He was most famous for his three-hand effect which he achieved by placing the tune in the middle of the keyboard (to be played by alternating thumbs) while both hands were engaged in elaborate passage work at either end. Unlike Liszt, Thalberg never progressed past the operatic fantasies and variations on popular airs which had been the mainstay of virtuoso pianists in the first half of the 19th century. In 1855 Thalberg toured America and it was during this tour that he exploited his Air Anglais Varié (Home! Sweet Home!). When he retired in 1864 he settled in Italy and, it was reported, refused to go near a piano ever again. The French-born pianist Miss Arabella Goddard based herself in London where she astutely married the important music critic James William Davison, who could be relied upon to give bad notices to any prospective rivals. In 1873 she commenced a three-year world tour during which she visited Australia. Theodor Leschetizky was perhaps better known by the turn of the century as a pedagogue, but he had an extremely successful career as a concert artist, particularly in Russia. While his Andante Finale is masterfully written, there is little doubt that such an operatic fantasy for the left hand alone represents a peccadillo. The gesture is somewhat lost on recording since the effect is visual and one often wonders what the performer was intended to do with the right hand? Ironically Teresa Carreño, characterised as the Valkyrie of the piano, seems best remembered for her Little Waltz with which her concert programs inevitably concluded. Carreño had a remarkably diverse career which included not only conducting and managing an opera company but singing some of the principal roles as well. If her Little Waltz has perhaps been forgotten she is remembered in her native Venezuela as the composer of its national anthem. 5
The many piano works of Joachim Raff, contained among a total opus of 214 published works, fell into neglect soon after his death. Like many musicians who associated themselves with the New German School he seems to have been overshadowed by the two most obvious composers of that school, Liszt and Wagner. His works, like those of Anton Rubinstein and Moritz Moszkowski, have come to be regarded as examples of late 19th-century salon music a genre considered to be too sentimental and cloying for contemporary taste. While Wilhelm Backhaus is more associated in our minds with his interpretations of Beethoven, he studied with Eugène d Albert a Liszt protégé whom Liszt termed the second Tausig and who, for a short period, was Teresa Carreño s third husband. This background perhaps helps to explain Backhaus sentimental peccadillo on the serenade from Mozart s Don Giovanni which seems to date from 1924. While this may seem incongruous in light of Backhaus later reputation as a serious pianist, his contemporary, Walter Gieseking, also made several concert arrangements during this period. Percy Grainger was undoubtedly one of Australia s best-recognised pianists in addition to his many other talents and notorieties. His Ramble on the Last Love Duet was a Yuletide gift in memory of his beloved mother Rose and the connection between the title of Richard Strauss opera Der Rosenkavalier (The Rose-Bearer) and her name is not coincidental. The unconventional and innovative Grainger frequently promoted composers who might otherwise have been neglected by the serious musical public. Hence his arrangements of Gershwin, whom Grainger considered to be a song writer of equal talent to Schubert, Schumann, Dowland and many others. Similarly, Grainger often played the American folk-music-inspired works of David Guion and of the black American/Canadian composer R. Nathaniel Dett. Grainger twice recorded Dett s Juba in 1920 and 1946 both on 78rpm, and these recordings were so successful that when Juba was published by Allan and Co. (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Bendigo) they prominently announced it as played by the world-renowned pianist Percy Grainger and featured an ink drawing of Grainger on the cover. 6
Alfred Grünfeld, characterised by Schonberg as a super cocktail pianist, was one of the first pianists to make commercial recordings (1907) and specialised in Strauss waltz arrangements such as Soirée de Vienne of 1852 (nine Schubert dance arrangements) which Carl Tausig followed in 1862 with his Nouvelles Soirées de Vienne based on the waltzes of Johann Strauss II. By the end of the 19th century, this seems to have developed into a genre with examples by such pianist/composers as Leopold Godowsky and Moriz Rosenthal. Dennis Hennig Recording Producer Ralph Lane Recording Engineer David Gleeson Editor Allan MacLean Cover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd ABC Classics Robert Patterson, Martin Buzacott, Hilary Shrubb, Natalie Shea, Claudia Crosariol 1990 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2010 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited. 7
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