Franz Xaver Scharwenka (1850-1924)
Piano Concerto No 1 in B-flat minor, Op 32 (1877)
Symphony in C minor, Op 60 (1882)
Jonathan Powell (piano), Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra/Łukasz Borowicz
rec. 2022, Adam Mickiewicz University Auditorium – Concert Hall of the Poznań Philharmonic, Poznań, Poland
cpo 555 571-2 [69]
When, in the 1960s, the pianist Earl Wild rescued Scharwenka’s first piano concerto from decades-long obscurity, the New York Times’s chief music critic Harold C. Schonberg delightedly proclaimed the piece “a wing-ding of a romp”. While that description very effectively conveys an impression of the concerto’s flashy, energetic showiness, it also appears to imply, if only by omission, that the work lacks real musical substance. Perhaps that was what Glenn Gould was getting at when he referred to “Scharwenka’s B-flat-minor horror”.
However, in reality the handful of recorded performances that have appeared sporadically on disc over the past 60 years hasn’t included anything that could be regarded as actually horrific. In fact, the various accounts have often been quite the reverse. During that time, I have collected and listened to four of them. A pioneering recording from Earl Wild and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf first appeared in 1969. It has since been reissued on several other labels and was reviewed on these pages in 2008. The second recording of the piece dates from 1991 when Seta Tanyel was accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Yuri Simonov (Collins Classics 12632). Scharwenka’s eventual inclusion in Hyperion’s much lauded Romantic Piano Concerto series was, of course, inevitable, and Marc-André Hamelin and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Michael Stern did the honours in a 2005 performance of the first concerto that appeared as part of volume 38 (CDA67508). In 2013 Alexander Markovich and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra/Neeme Järvi recorded performances of all four of Scharwenka’s concertos, subsequently released on a Chandos two-disc set (CHAN 10814(2)). [There was also a 2001 release on the Centaur label in which soloist Laurence Jeanningros was accompanied by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra directed by Paul Freeman (CRC 2500), but I have not managed to hear it].
Re-listening to those four performances and reading past MusicWeb reviews brought home one important point in particular. In considering the Hamelin/Stern disc, my late colleague Terry Barfoot shrewdly noted that “The Scharwenka concerto is at its strongest when its urgency is at its height… [T]here is a tendency for the slower music… to sound like a longueur…”. That observation hits the nail squarely on the head. This, it turns out, is a piece that really benefits from a barnstorming, hell-for-leather, hammer-and-tongs approach that deploys simple (!) virtuosic showmanship to disguise its essentially conventional and generally not particularly remarkable musical content. It really does work best when wholeheartedly approached as a wing-ding of a romp.
The proof of that particular pudding may be found in the Tanyel/Simonov performance – the only one of the four that seems never to have been reviewed by MusicWeb. Its distinguishing feature lies in the notably measured tempi that are adopted in each movement. In the first, Tanyel comes in at a leisurely 12:14, while her three rivals favour brisker tempi that mean their accounts range in duration between 10:23 and 10:39. She takes, in similar fashion, 8:04 over the succeeding scherzo, while the others all come in at somewhere between 7:00 and 7:11. The finale confirms the same pattern. Tanyel takes 12:23 over the movement, while Hamelin clocks in at 10:21 and Wild at 10:35 (somewhat surprisingly, Markovich, at 12:21, is virtually up there with Tanyel on that one).
Very well played though her performance is, Tanyel simply doesn’t deliver the sheer visceral punch that each of those others – and especially Earl Wild’s pioneering performance – undeniably does. I simply don’t think that such an idiosyncratically restrained interpretation would convince a new listener that Scharwenka’s first is any more remarkable than dozens of other concertos from that same era. In that context, it’s worth noting that, when Hyperion decided to include Scharwenka’s second and third concertos in the Romantic Piano Concerto series, they quite happily repackaged Tanyel’s earlier Collins Classics performances as volume 33 (CDA 67365). When, however, they wanted to include the first piano concerto, they didn’t re-use Tanyel’s Collins Classics recording but instead, as already noted, opted for Marc-André Hamelin’s more urgent account. [The Hyperion series completes its full Scharwenka set, incidentally, by including the fourth, performed by Stephen Hough, on volume 11, CDA 66790].
Having looked at the existing releases, let’s now turn our attention to this new one. Pianist Jonathan Powell has, over the years, been much admired by my colleagues, often in repertoire that’s little known or rarely heard. Having heard him perform Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum at London’s Purcell Room in 2003, our Seen & Heard reviewer Colin Clark described Powell as “a young man with a serious technique and a dazzling intellect to match… [and] a major talent… [who] should be watched closely”. Some years later, in 2015, MusicWeb’s founding editor Rob Barnett was sufficiently impressed by his disc of music by Konstantin Eiges that he went on to choose it as one of his personal Recordings of the Year. Moving on five more years, we find Powell’s mammoth eight hours long performance of Sorabji’s Sequentia Cyclica, Super Dies Irae ex Missa Pro Defunctis, a work of which he had given the world premiere in 2010, described by my colleague Jonathan Woolf as “technically remarkable, idiomatically perceptive… [and] performed with unremittingly massive conviction”. It is merely considerations of space that prevent me from quoting from equally enthusiastic reviews of his performances of music by Jānis Mediņš, Egon Kornauth, Grigory Krein and others.
On the basis of this new disc, I can only concur with my colleagues’ verdicts on Jonathan Powell’s remarkable technique. What, though, to return to the matter under consideration, of his interpretational approach to Scharwenka’s concerto – an issue that was certainly enough, as already noted, to torpedo at least one other account?
On paper, Powell appears to take a somewhat more measured view than his competitors. If Seta Tanyel is excluded from the comparison, he delivers the most leisurely recorded performances of the first and second movements, as well as the second-slowest of the finale. On this occasion, however, any differences are usually measured in matters of a few seconds and consequently they do not compromise the performance to the extent that they did in the case of Ms Tanyel’s. His account now sits quite comfortably alongside those of Messrs Hamelin and Markovich. While none of those rival Earl Wild’s in sheer wing-dingery, all are good, solid performances that confirm the concerto’s individuality and distinction – two qualities recognised by no less a judge than Tchaikovsky who considered that it “stood out from the grey mediocrity” of many others composed at the time.
It is, however, worth pointing out that this new disc is particularly welcome for the quality of its sound. Engineers Łukasz Kurzawski and Jacek Frącek have produced a particularly clear and transparent recording – further enhanced, as these things sometimes somewhat oddly are, by an upward tweak of the volume control – that finely balances the soloist and the orchestra while simultaneously uncovering plenty of felicitous detail in the orchestration. The playing of the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra under its music director and chief conductor Łukasz Borowicz is exemplary. The MusicWeb search engine confirms that many of my colleagues have been very impressed with Borowicz’s previous recordings – of which there have, it seems, been more than 120 – and I am pleased to join their ranks.
Scharwenka’s C minor symphony is a much rarer bird than his first piano concerto. Conventionally laid out in four movements, its dark-hued, dramatic opening movement, marked Andante – Allegro non troppo, is followed by a lively, dancelike second (Allegro molto quasi presto) and a rather moving third (Adagio). A finale – once again marked Allegro molto quasi presto – marches determinedly towards a grandiose, brass-heavy final peroration that brings matters to a highly satisfying conclusion. I have only ever come across one account of the work before. That was its world premiere recording, set down in brightly attractive sound in 2003 by the Gävle Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christopher Fifield (Sterling CDS-1060-2). As far as I’m aware, the performance now under review becomes only the second to have appeared on disc.
At the time of the Sterling disc’s original release in 2004 it was reviewed by Rob Barnett, while, 12 years later, both Bob Stevenson and I reviewed its subsequent reissue. All three of us were struck by the way in which Scharwenka’s symphony recalled the work of other composers. Rob referenced not only a “touch” of the composer’s early mentor Liszt and a “dusting” of Tchaikovsky but also hints of Bruckner and Dvorak, as well as a glance or two back at Beethoven and Schumann and even a premonition of Elgar. In his turn, Bob detected even more fingerprints – of, among others, Grieg, Wagner, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Bruch.
In 2004, Rob had “warmly welcomed” the symphony’s reappearance in the repertoire. Bob and I, however, weren’t quite of the same mind in 2016. While noting quite positively that it was a piece that improved on repeated acquaintance, Bob still considered it not much more than “listenable and workmanlike stuff, fairly typical of an eclectic composer of the second or third rank but… nothing to set the musical world on fire”. I, on the other hand, was rather more enthusiastic, suggesting that it would “delight anyone who appreciates the musical world of the very productive third quarter of the 19th century”.
Listening once again to the symphony, I have to say that I find it even more impressive than I did eight years ago. There are, I think, two reasons for that. In the first place, as time has gone on, ever more pieces of late Romantic repertoire have been unearthed and recorded – not least by the likes of such enterprising companies as Sterling and cpo. Inevitably in that process, the search for neglected masterpieces has brought to light many works that have, in sad fact, fallen far short of that particular categorisation. Instead, they have all too often proved to be of the “grey mediocrity” standard that Tchaikovsky had condemned. With these new recordings now allowing us to hear far more of his contemporaries’ compositions, it’s possible to set Scharwenka’s symphony within a broader musical perspective. We may, in the past, have been inclined to measure him only against other composers with undeniably greater talents. Now, however, we can compare his work with that of a larger number of contemporary composers of his own ability or less. As a result, the undoubted strengths of Scharwenka’s music – including, but not limited to, melodic invention, fine orchestration (revealed particularly well in this recording), propulsive vigour, effective yet controlled sentimentality and a real sense of dramatic flair – may be much more easily perceived and appreciated.
The second reason why I feel even more positive about Scharwenka’s symphony in 2024 is that I have now heard this new recording. Christopher Fifield’s 2004 performance was certainly a good one and he and the players of the Gävle Symphony Orchestra did themselves great credit. This new account from Borowicz and his Polish orchestra is, however, even better, largely because he imparts a greater sense of drive to the music. As I noted earlier, MusicWeb’s Terry Barfoot once perceptively remarked that Scharwenka’s music “is at its strongest when its urgency is at its height… [T]here is a tendency for the slower music… to sound like a longueur…”. While Terry was actually referring to the first piano concerto, I find at least the first part of his observation to be equally applicable to the symphony. It’s therefore of some significance that Borowicz’s tempi are swifter than Fifield’s in every one of the symphony’s four movements and even though the final discrepancy between the two performances comes in at less than 3 minutes, the divergence feels rather more than that.
That greater degree of purposeful musical urgency, consistently applied, might even, I suspect, overcome Bob Stevenson’s frustrations (“The third movement… meanders a bit without doing very much… The last movement… frustratingly, keeps getting reined back and pausing”). Bob, you will no doubt recall, noted that his impression of the symphony improved each time he heard it: I suspect that, if he were to listen to this impressive new account, it might do so even more.
The CD booklet contains a very useful and informative essay by Mikołaj Rykowski. There is, however, an annoying mistake on the release’s rear cover which directs anyone wanting to jump straight to the symphony on its own to play the disc from track 5 onwards. If, however, you were to follow that instruction, you’d miss out entirely on the first movement of a symphony that, if not quite a wing-ding of a romp, is certainly interesting, very enjoyable and well worth hearing.
Rob Maynard
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