Carl Czerny: Piano Music, Volume One—L’Écho des Alpes Suisses, Livre 2 No. 1; Impromptu brillant sur un thème national Suisse; Impromptu sentimental sur le thème ‘O nume benefico’ de l’opera La Gazza ladra, de Rossini; Hommage aux Dames—No. 2; Fantaisie sur des Mélodies de Beethoven. Jingshu Zhao, piano. Toccata Classics. $20.99.
Carl Czerny: Piano Music, Volume Two—Grandes Variations brillantes et concertantes pour deux Pianofortes sur un Thème favori de l’Opéra Montecchi e Capuleti; Rondo Brillant for piano duet, Op. 321; Duo Brillant et Concertant pour Deux Pianos, Op. 358; Fantaisie et Variations à Quatre Mains sur l’Opéra de Bellini “I Puritani.” Jingshu Zhao and Haoyue Liang, piano. Toccata Classics. $20.99.
Among mostly forgotten composers, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) remains ironically well-remembered – not for his very extensive production of music of all sorts for salons and concert halls but for his specifically pedagogical creations, which piano students still use to this day. Ironically, those learning exercises have led to dismissal of any claim that Czerny might otherwise have had to being a composer of some stature, reducing him to a skilled but limited teacher creating mostly forgettable music designed to help budding pianists flower more fully.
Liszt and Beethoven knew better. Liszt was one of Czerny’s students, as Czerny himself was taught by Beethoven. And when Liszt produced the remarkable tour de force called Hexameron, consisting of variations on the march from Bellini’s I Puritani by six great pianists including Liszt himself, Czerny was one of the other five chosen (the remaining ones being Thalberg, Pixis, Herz, and Chopin).
On the face of it, it is hard to believe that a composer with more than a thousand works to his credit – 861 with opus numbers plus many unpublished, and with many of the numbered works containing multiple unrelated pieces that could easily have opus numbers of their own – could have produced little beyond repetitive and trivial, if well-meaning, practice material. But that is the underlying assumption about Czerny, to such an extent that Jingshu Zhao’s two Toccata Classics volumes of Czerny’s works for solo and dual pianos and piano four hands contain nine items of which not a single one has ever been recorded before. Among composers ripe for rediscovery, Czerny is riper than most.
This is not to say, on the basis of these very-well-played CDs, that Czerny comes across as an unaccountably neglected pianistic giant such as Alkan, who was in that unenviable position until he was “rediscovered” in the last few decades. The Czerny pieces on these discs can reasonably be thought of as, by and large, salon pleasantries – performative selections from the composer’s near-inexhaustible supply. The first two solo works in Volume One, both based on themes from or associated with Switzerland, show this clearly. The first is labeled Introduction & Variations brillantes sur l’air Suisse Alles liebt/Tout aime, the word brillant being one that occurs again and again in Czerny’s virtuoso piano music – and is a key to both his intent and his style in these pieces. Within this specific work, which includes an introduction, statement of the theme, five variations, and a finale, the word brillante appears in two tempo markings for elements of the piece in addition to being used in the overall title. There is no attempt at profundity anywhere: two sections labeled Andante sostenuto have that marking for tempo contrast, not anything approaching seriousness, while the Molto agitato variation is bouncy, not agitated in any negative sense or, indeed, in any emotional way at all. The second Swiss-focused item offered here features brief forays into more-distant keys, with pleasant tempo and dynamic contrasts throughout – everything in its place and everything designed for listeners’ pleasure. Arpeggios and other note cascades abound, and delicacy contrasts with drama in the context of a sure command of the entire keyboard.
The Czerny impromptu on an aria from La Gazza ladra is sentimental for sure, as its title indicates, and sustains a pleasantly rocking motion almost throughout. The excerpt from Hommage aux Dames is labeled Élegantine ou Rondeau brillant and is not so much elegant as it is a display piece that is indeed filled with pianistic brilliance – which flows nicely into gentler passages. The conclusion is “tossed off” virtuosically to a particularly high degree. And then, last on this disc, Zhao offers one Czerny work with pretensions to somewhat more-serious consideration – although quite without pretentiousness. The Beethoven fantasy opens with more seriousness than the other works on the CD, retaining a darker coloration and some drama almost throughout. It is filled with extended slower passages – unusual for these works – and the decorations and virtuoso material arise from the more-majestic thematic elements instead of sounding tacked-on or created purely for display purposes. In this fantasy, Czerny uses the piano’s lower register to a greater extent than in the other pieces Zhao plays – most of the time, he favors the sounds of higher notes for their lighter weight and aspirations to delicacy. Although not exactly a tribute to his onetime teacher, this Beethoven-focused Czerny work is evidence both of the warm regard that the mature Czerny retained for his tutor and of Czerny’s ability to wear a somewhat more-substantial stylistic cloak than usual on suitable occasions.
For the second volume of these world première recordings, Zhao is joined by Haoyue Liang for some interesting demonstrations of the similarities and differences between music for piano four hands, on the one hand (so to speak), and for two pianos. Czerny wrote a considerable amount in both forms, with the two-piano music tending to be grander in scale and more oriented toward public performance, while the four-hands-on-one-keyboard works are inclined to less drama and a smaller scale. Thus, Czerny’s variations on a theme from Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (the names of the opera’s title are reversed in the title of the piano piece) runs a substantial 25 minutes, and the Op. 358 Duo Brillant (that word again!) lasts even longer, nearly half an hour. The two piano-four-hands pieces on the disc run only about seven minutes and a bit less than 15, respectively.
What is intriguing about all four of these offerings is the skill with which Czerny spreads pianistic duties between the two performers and the care with which he designates tempo and emotional indications. The word calando (“calming down,” meaning reducing both tempo and volume) appears frequently; unsurprisingly, so do words including brillante (or brillant), dolce, vivacità, leggiermente, delicatezza, espressivo, and so forth. Czerny had clear (and clearly communicated) ideas about the way these pieces should sound, but he also left plenty of interpretative room for the two performers to showcase their respective virtuosic abilities. Zhao and Liang do just that, operating as an efficient performing duo while trading off or mutually engaging in the works’ virtuosic complementarity and their moments of emotional communicativeness (surface-level but effectively transmitted). These performers are not as tight-knit as the best duo pianists can be – there is no sense that each is almost intuitively tuned into the other’s thinking or that both can meld their respective parts effortlessly. Instead, there is something a bit studied in these performances, a sense more of knowing the music than of feeling it. To be sure, though, there is no great depth of feeling to be had in these works, and there is nothing wrong with letting Czerny’s propensity for teaching pianism in his other works carry across, to some extent, to these more-substantial pieces. Hopefully there will be more volumes of Czerny’s concert and salon pieces to come, from these pianists and others – because these discs show clearly that there is a treasure trove of Czerny piano music just waiting to be rediscovered and used for its primary purpose, which is a mix of pleasurable listening and challenging performance requirements. And if the gems mined from Czerny’s oeuvre turn out to be only semi-precious, as is the case for all the pieces on these discs, it is worth remembering that semi-precious stones have beauties all their own, and tend to be more readily accessible than more-rarefied jewels.
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