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I no longer have the MDG booklet notes....

According to Matthias Schaefers's notes, a review of the first performance described the concerto as "intended primarily for the display of virtuoso brilliance on the part of the interpreter of the piano part".  Schaefers goes on to say that during the compositional process Draeseke told the dedicatee that he

was disturbed by the passage work when it came to the design of the overall structure of the work.  As a result, for the time being he had made a purely symphonic design and planned to add the passage work in later on. In the outer movements [...], however, passage work and symphonic design sometimes appear as extremes between which no mediation at all seems to be intended.  [...T]he beginning of the first movement is already indicative of what is to follow.  The orchestra intones the main theme [...] but is interrupted by rushing scales and broken chords in the abrupt interventions of the the piano.  It is only after the third entry of the orchestra that the piano part takes on motivic trenchancy -- and this only for a short time.  [...T]he sections in the further course of the outer movements in which the piano is included in the motivic process are relatively short. 

The quality of the thematic material aside, Schaefers is suggesting that the piano part in the outer movements is worked in almost as an afterthought.

It's almost as if Draeseke is deliberately parodying the worst excesses of the virtuosic Lisztian concertos of his contemporaries.

Perhaps that's the point.  It would not be the only time a composer took the opportunity to lay out a bit (or a lot) of irony.  The outer movements are so un-Draeseke that maybe he was just playing it for laughs.  What saves it all is that there is so much good humor in it, whereas Liszt's bad imitators are deadly serious in their Sturm-und-Drang excess.  Once you get past the initial bewilderment of the Lisztian bombast, the concerto can be enjoyed for what it is, which is a lot of fun -- Victorian music hall, Mr. Ed, and all.

[...H]ow would you rate his Piano concerto. It didn't make much of an impression on me the first time. Should I revisit the piece?

Funny you should ask, because I have been listening to the Piano Concerto quite a bit over the past few weeks.  It's hard to believe that an intellectual composer like Draeseke could write a work so monumentally vulgar (at least in its outer movements) as this. 

From the opening movement, which seems to consist mostly of the piano trying to cram in more scales than the time allotted to play them -- and not much else -- to the finale, which opens with a dead-ringer for the theme from "Mr. Ed" and follows this with a tune straight out of a Victorian music hall, it's a work that wears its bad taste on its sleeve to the same degree that Tchaikovsky wears his heart. 

...And yet...

And yet, we end up with a work SO bad that it's good.  It's the sort of thing that Rubinstein would have written if he had a better command of form and orchestration. Draeseke's Piano Concerto is the very definition of a guilty pleasure, to be experienced in public with embarrassment and in private with mirth.

And in the middle of it all is a slow movement so sublime, as Alan aptly described it, as to seem to be the product of a different composer.  It is, perhaps, Draeseke's most beautiful creation.  When it is over, you'll want to queue it up for an immediate encore because you just don't want to spoil the mood left by the gentle ending.


Yes, by all means revisit the piece, but I would recommend the Tanski/Hanson on MD+G over the Becker/Sanderling on Hyperion.  In terms of sound, the Becker/Sanderling has it all over the Tanski/Hanson. It is clearer and less tubby. We hear more orchestral detail, and Becker's modern Steinway is a better instrument than Tanski's 1925 Blüthner, which sounds improbably fortepiano-ish for a concert grand dating from my grandfather's 29th year. 

But this is an example where the recording with the weaker sound is noticeably the better performance. I don't mean technically, because even here I think Becker/Sanderling play with greater virtuosity, but Tanski and Hanson consistently do a better job of bringing out the best in the music itself. Compare, for example, the final variation of the slow movement: Becker and Sanderling are pretty enough, but Tanski and Hanson play it so delicately -- words like "ethereal" and "gossamer" come to mind -- as to make you sit up in your chair to listen.

Sublime indeed.

Of Draeseke's symphonies I only know the first and the third, and had these been my introduction to the composer I would have never listened to him again. It was enough for me to avoid risking the second and fourth. 

Luckily, my introduction was the quintet for piano, horn, and strings, a winning composition from first note to last that encouraged me to track down more.  His clarinet sonata and cello sonata are also equally engaging works that I would cheerfully recommend to anyone. As for the rest, however, I can work up little enthusiasm.

Why is Draeseke, then, a tough nut to crack in most instances yet so immediately appealing in others?  Or do others find an equal level of difficulty (or engagement) in all his work?

Not everyone was meant to write a symphony. I think Koechlin's chamber music is quite lovely, so I'm not going to let his failure as a symphonist deter me from his other works.  If my first encounter with Robert Fuchs had been with his symphonies, I never would have returned to his music again.

It's just the concert announcement, with the usual location, performers, date, and time, and also a duration.

The Hiller symphonies aren't really comparable with Lachner: they're much more concise works.

I don't think anyone was actually comparing them, it was just a matter of the degree of expected enjoyment. I approached the purchase thinking the Hiller would be more enjoyable than the Lachner, but my experience was the opposite. 

It could easily have been a purchase of completely unrelated things, say one disc of 18th century keyboard music and the other of 20th century opera.  I generally like the latter but am cool to the former, so I would expect to come away enjoying the 20th century opera more than the 18th century keyboard music, but would find myself pleasantly surprised if it were the reverse, as it was with Hiller and Lachner.

To fill out my recent JPC order of Hiller and Grimm I decided to give the Lachner 4 a chance based on Alan's description of it here, even though what I've heard of Lachner's early symphonies (as opposed to his later chamber music) didn't strike me as my cup of tea.

To my great surprise, it's turned out to be my favorite, by a wide margin, of the three discs that I ordered. It's happily free from the Sturm-und-Drang melodrama that plagues some of Lachner's other symphonies, while being possessed of a sort of leisurely grandeur and dignity that we associate with the mature Schubert.

In any case, if I'm only going to own one Lachner Symphony, it's going to be this one.

Agreed.  It took a moment for me to realize the finale had even begun.  It's as if it were the second half of one long movement, separated only by a double bar.

Luckily it arrived in the post this morning. On a single hearing the symphony strikes me as a competent, somewhat forward looking work for its period, graced by effective inner movements but let down by a finale that doesn't stand up to the material that preceded it.  In short, it's not bad, but it's nothing that I would recommend.

The Suite in Canon Form made a more favorable impression, having a great deal of period (albeit pastiche) charm.

Mine is still in transit from JPC.

I first encountered Suder decades ago in a 1988 Calig disc of the Piano Quartet in B minor, oddly paired with the Chopin Piano Trio.  I bought it for the Chopin, but kept it for the Suder, which I found so lovely that I thought it strange that he could be so little known.  Wonderful piece.

I didn't even know there was an original version of the First Sonata. The published version is so long that I assumed it couldn't possibly have been cut from a larger original. I have two recordings of it, one by Gordon Fergus-Thompson on a 1988 Kingdom disc that times-in at 43:41, a wonderful performance that I return to frequently. I also have it by Ponti, but he gives it the usual Ponti treatment, blasting through at 36:07 and completely missing the poetry of the work.  The approach that worked so well for his Raff and Reinecke concertos here fails decidedly. 

I would be interested to know how other recordings of the First Sonata time-in compared to this new recording of the manuscript. What other recordings do you have, Alan? By way of comparison, Fergus-Thompson takes 28:13 for the original version of the second Sonata, while Ponti speeds through it at 21:52, which is almost as fast as a typical performance of the truncated version. Again, Ponti in this case misses all the poetry in favor of bravura display.

My experience has been that Rachmaninoff suffers when he is trying to be concise. The cuts that he made to the Second Sonata and to the Second Symphony weaken both works to a great degree. The only time I think he got it wrong the first time around was in the Fourth Concerto, which in its original version does have trouble getting to the point and making a clear argument, although in that case it was less a matter of cuts than the fact that the original version of the fourth Concerto is a very different composition, although not so drastic as the original version of the First Concerto which is almost an entirely different piece than the second version (and which was also greatly improved not by cuts but by recomposition).

The First Sonata holds a very special place in my heart. I first heard it at a concert at Ravinia in 1982. Alexis Weissenberg played it as the second half of a concert that opened with the Schumann Fantasy in C. He played both beautifully, and there was something about hearing it on a warm summer night in the concert shed, open on the sides to the night air and surroundings, that made the whole experience unforgettable.

I wonder if it's his instrument? I am reminded of a local faculty member who I thought had good technique but whose tone was thin, like we hear in the audio samples here. This always perplexed me, and I surmised that it might be a case of a musician being faithful to a certain instrument but not realizing how it actually sounds at a distance as opposed to tucked under one's chin.

How much proof do we need?  Grimm's symphony is just one of many.  There is a performance gap to be sure, but no gap in terms of worthy material.