Unsung Composers

I have posted my rendition of this monster of a concerto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKUcPP_f8l0

With 4 movements at over an hour in length, it was probably the longest piano concerto ever written at the time.  Even today I only know of a handful that are longer, mostly 20th century works.  This is the culmination of two years of work (okay, not constant as I did dozens of other pieces in that time).  But I started this one before my channel went public.  I put it on hold for a while when I learned there is another rendition out there in MuseScore, but I think I've improved on the sound quality of that one.

I consider this to be almost a concerto sandwich - the first and last movements are each long enough to be stand-alone concertos in their own right.  The second movement is a fairly standard slow movement, but the third movement is - weird.  It sounded to me less like classical music and more like a precursor to modern techno or dubstep.  So I had a friend create a few examples of just that using an AI generator - links are in the video description.  They're a fun listen if you're into that sort of thing.

It's wonderful - you did a fabulous job!

If helpful for other listeners here, I posted on the YouTube comments that the Scherzo and Finale move along much better if you increase the speed toggle to about x1.25 for these movements.

Otherwise, other than a few wrong notes and harmonies picked up during transfer from Musescore, this is a great achievement and was deservedly Kreutzer's most celebrated work, living up to the praise Berlioz heaped on it.

Thank you Darrel!

Could you point out where you think those wrong notes are?  Nothing stood out to me, but it's a very long piece, I wouldn't be surprised if I missed a thing or two.  Not sure if correcting them is worth reposting the piece or not...

Note - I did not use the existing MuseScore rendition, this is entirely my own work.  I do use MuseScore in my process as something of a middle-man between Mozart where I do most of the note entry and Sibelius where I do the polishing, as exporting from Mozart directly to Sibelius often seriously corrupts everything.  As it turned out, I had to reinput large portions of the 1st movement directly in Sibelius anyhow.

There's probably no need to re-upload the work, unless you really feel like doing so and, in fact, the errors I heard were all in the first movement (indeed, not all of them may be errors!).

If you feel like taking a look, here are the parts when I think I heard something 'off' on my latest hearing:

Mvt 1:

• Bars 3 and 4 of piano entry
• Cellos around the 4:19 mark in the video
• Piano part at the 7:44 mark
• Harmony at the 10:19 mark
• Harmony or piano (can't tell) at letter 'I'
• Piano from 16:05 should be a C-flat in the trill
• Harmony around the 16:50 mark
• Piano from 18:38
• Harmony from 19:35

Alright, I'll investigate.  If nothing else, I might post a corrected version of just the audio to my Patreon (http://patreon.com/ForgottenPianoConcertos), along with the tempo changes you suggested in the 3rd and 4th movements.  (Those would require resequencing the latter half of the video if I were to make another one.)  Unlike YouTube, Patreon allows you to easily replace files with corrected versions.  For YT, I'd have to make a whole new video because you can't replace them with a correction.

But I don't host videos on Patreon, I embed the YT ones instead - even for a short one it takes forever to upload for some reason (like 3+ hours for something that YT uploaded in 5 minutes).  This one would probably take a day and a half...

You sir have a very discerning ear.  I was in fact able to locate errors at each of those locations or close to it.  (e.g. 4:19 the error was the violas not the cellos, but close enough).  Makes me wonder how much else I missed that just doesn't sound wrong enough to be noticeable.  Even in these cases, it didn't sound that wrong to me most of the time.  Do you have some particular familiarity with this piece?  e.g. Have you studied it before in an academic setting or something?  I know you expressed interest months ago when I mentioned I was working on it.

Haha, thanks! I've been aware of this concerto for over 15 years and am (if I remember correctly) responsible for its digitisation in the Bibliothèque national de Paris and transfer across to IMSLP.

I've never studied it in an academic setting, no, but I've played through parts of it at home on numerous occasions (mainly before I had kids 😅) and was impressed by it from the get-go.

I've listened to your realisation numerous times and now feel that the speed changes should be more like x1.10 for the slow movement and x1.20 or x1.25 for the last two movements.

Well I tried out some tempos - I personally found the x1.25 to be too fast on both the 3rd and 4th.  I had settled on x1.15, but I'm willing to meet you halfway at x1.20.  I still find it a bit fast, but it may be just that I've heard it so many times at the tempos I originally chose that it's hard to adjust in my brain.

Corrected audio has been posted here (https://www.patreon.com/posts/leon-kreutzer-in-138742444).

Whilst recognising this is a busy time for everyone personally, I'd really like to hear other members' thoughts on this mammoth achievement by Darrel.

What say you?

Best
4c

Will have a listen soon, thanks for the reminder!, and to his other Kreutzer realizations soon; I have been interested in this composer for some time :)

There are other Kreutzer realisations coming!? Excellent news!

Kreutzer is most certainly an uneven compositional character. If you juxtapose something as grand and concert-worthy as this concerto with the string quartets – some of which are relatively bizarre (I still love the 6th though!) – it's hard to understand where his mind was at sometimes!

It might be instructive to anyone interested in him to read about the pieces he chose to programme in his concerts, which included his Symphony in B-flat and excerpts from his opera La fille d'Azure, as well as some orchestral songs. It seems he was astute in terms of which pieces he chose to unveil to his audience (which, interestingly, rarely accommodated the general public whose musical proclivities he seems to have detested).

4c

I have waded through the first movement (at the second attempt).

He had obviously listened to Beethoven, but I fear that I was put in mind of Rubinstein's Ocean Symphony (in its uncut state). Not in style,I will say, but in length and (lack of) substance.

I will try the other movements later and see whether they are more worthwhile.

Do I think it's a particularly good concerto as a whole? Not really. But it is a fascinating one, composed by someone set on adding a completely individual contribution to the genre. In a way, we can perhaps best compare Kreutzer to someone like Koechlin almost a century later. That 3rd movement is something quite unique, and I found it quite difficult to get out of my head. However, as a complete work I feel that it presents a potentially insurmountable hurdle in that interminable first movement. Once you survive that it's quite an enjoyable experience.

Nitpick: I think in the case of Rubinstein's Ocean we can't really speak of "cut" and "uncut" versions, but rather of "original" and "extended" ones.

I think you've made a great point, Ilja, about Kreutzer adding a "complete individual contribution". His individuality as a person and his individuality of expression is one of the things that I've found most fascinating about Kreutzer.

You can't compare the style and development of this symphonic concerto, nor indeed any of his other output that I've heard, with anything by any other composer. We are all much more used to hearing works by composers who, for the vast majority, have gone through some sort of formal conservatory training - thereby assimilating rigorous teaching and various musical influences - something which Kreutzer didn't have. This shows, of course, but the music is (to me at least) all the more original.

Someone here or at IMSLP made an interesting suggestion some time ago, when discussing Kreutzer's quartets and symphonic output – that Kreutzer was composing for himself, into a vacuum, as it were. So, other than the clear influence of Beethoven, his voice is entirely his own.

Fascinating stuff!

Quote from: 4candles on Thursday 18 September 2025, 11:50There are other Kreutzer realisations coming!? Excellent news!

That's news to me.  I'm not aware of any other concertante work of his, but then I don't know much about him in general besides the concerto.  I'd certainly be willing to feature him again if anyone knows of other works in the genre that he did.

Perhaps eschiss1 was referring to those AI techno-remixes of the 3rd movement I had done?  That was fun, but I don't know if I'll be doing much of that in the future.  It just seemed like a natural fit for that movement.

Thought I remembered someone having done a synthesized recording of some of his chamber music. (Actually, it seems I'm remembering Matesic having recorded his 8th quartet, Adagio for A-flat, and violin/piano Romance Op.10 (back in 2018) over at IMSLP... my mistake.)

btw, added the piano concerto to the very summary list of his works at Wikipedia.

I'd be curious to hear what Mark and Gareth have to say about Darrel's  Kreutzer concerto realisation, given that they were both so complimentary upon hearing the now much inferior-sounding Musescore version.

Quote from: 4candles on Thursday 18 September 2025, 16:27I think you've made a great point, Ilja, about Kreutzer adding a "complete individual contribution". His individuality as a person and his individuality of expression is one of the things that I've found most fascinating about Kreutzer.

Perhaps, a better comparison than the one to Koechlin is to William Henry Fry, whose lack of formal education caused him to write similarly idiosyncratic compositions in the form of the Niagara Symphony.

That Niagra Symphony was the most painful thing I have ever had to sit through, perhaps second to Symphonie romantique by Joncières.

But what of the Kreutzer FBerwald? Banishing WH Fry from your mind for the time be7ng, do you have any thoughts on this work?

So far the 1st movement failed to make any sort of impression, It felt like the composer is working in blocks of materials, placed after each other may be I have to hear this again. The 2nd movement is beautiful - Beethoven's shadow looms large but yet this didn't feel like a slavish imitation - quite charming! The 3rd movement is quirky - I can't decide if I love it or hate it. If only there was a way to hear [at least this movement] performed on real instrument - I have a feeling it might make quite an impact - the piano often felt like it was imitating xylophones or hammered dulcimers. I have yet to hear the last movement. 

Love or hate, that's kind of where I was on the 3rd movement.  It just didn't feel like music to me, or at least not classical music.  (There's a reason I made a techno remix of it, that actually felt more like where it belonged.)

It's no surprise that Beethoven's shadow appears here; there's a direct connection to the family - Léon's uncle Rodolphe Kreutzer was the dedicatee of Beethoven's so-called "Kreutzer Sonata" for violin, though he apparently never played it.  I'd be curious to see how this one in particular sounds on real instruments, as I believe the movement to be literally unplayable as written - I'm sure those tremolos on both piano and strings cannot be played faithfully except by machine.  I had to reduce the number of repetitions in them in order to make it sound even a bit realistic.

I am surprised to see so much disdain for the 1st movement, which was my favorite of the 4.  Aside from maybe being too long - I do feel like maybe it'd be better as a standalone piece, as would the 4th.  That's why I've described this as a concerto sandwich - 2 full concertos with a couple other movements stuck in between them.

This is quite a listen! Kreutzer's Piano Concerto must have struck anyone listening to it in the 1860s as being as revolutionary and idiosyncratic as Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique did a few decades earlier. My first reaction to the opening movement was that it's way too long, and it is of course, but not for the usual reason that the material has been stretched too thin. Certainly Kreutzer's material isn't that original or (I suspect) memorable and can't sustain the movement's length but his imagination has gone into overdrive in finding different ways to present it. So, for me at least, the fascination was in wondering what Kreutzer was going to do next, it's discursive but packed full of incident. Ilja's right, though, a more experienced or better educated composer would have reined in his imagination and produced a much more compact movement presenting his best ideas.

The slow movement is pretty straightforward, is effective and is a credit to Kreutzer, although still a mite overlong, even when speeded up as 4candles suggests. As everyone has written, the third movement is most unusual, but it's quirky playfulness is quite endearing and it's certainly the most memorable movement of the four. For me, the finale is the least interesting and individual movement. Again, it's overlong but, unlike the first movement, the almost unvaryingly upbeat character of the music gets wearing quite quickly. I'm delighted to have at last heard this flawed but fascinating piece in full, and great kudos to Darrel for sticking with it and making such a convincing realisation of it.