Brambach's Piano Concerto

[Mark Thomas]

A digital realisation which seems to have flown under UC's radar (or at least, I can't find a reference to it) is Darrel's of Caspar Brambach's Piano Concerto in D minor Op.39. Dating from 1879, it's a fine work, and I heartily recommend Darrel's newly-remastered realisation,

.The long first movement is appropriately muscular, with memorable material - I was reminded of Henselt's Concerto. The middle one has a lyrically contemplative character, perhaps reminiscent of some of Bruch's slow movements. The jolly finale doesn't quite match the inspiration of the earlier movements, but it's not trite and is by no means a dud. All in all, Brambach's Concerto is well worth rediscovery.

[Darrel Hoffman]

Thanks.  The Brambach was one of my earliest releases, it was in fact the very piece which inspired me to create the channel in the first place.  I was originally just doing these for myself, but when I did that one I decided "other people need to hear this".  So it was of course also one of the first to get a remaster.

The finale to me sounds in many ways heavily inspired by Chopin's 2 concerti, almost to the point of plagiarism, but I guess if you're going to copy, copy from the best.  Chopin remains my all-time favorite composer, but of course everything he wrote has been recorded countless times, so you won't be seeing him on my channel probably ever, unless some obscure unpublished work gets discovered in a box somewhere.

[eschiss1]

Was just thinking of this work and was going to ask if you'd had a look at it. Looking forward to hearing it.

[tpaloj]

It's rather inconvenient that the full score was never published, indeed there is only a set of parts and a solo part with cues added in available.

It might be worth mentioning that the autograph FS of this concerto is apparently kept in Brambach's musical Nachlass in Bonn, should it be of interest to readers here.

[Darrel Hoffman]

Indeed, the separate parts were what I worked with.  A lot of the pieces I've done have not had full conductor scores available.  It's not really a problem for me, just an extra step of doing some measure-numbering on each of the parts beforehand.  (Helps with sanity checking - and in many cases I've revealed actual errors in the score that way.)  In particular, the older pieces (usually pre-romantic) almost never had a conductor score.

If you're interested, I could send you my typeset version, though it's mainly designed to sound good rather than look good, so as usual I've taken some liberties with the formatting in that respect.  (e.g. spelling out some ornaments explicitly rather than relying on the built-in symbols, extra dynamics, articulations and tempo adjustments that aren't in the original, etc.)