Max Vogrich - Piano Concerto in E minor (1888)

[promusician]

Max Wilhelm Carl Vogrich (24 January 1852 – 10 June 1916) was an Austrian pianist and composer. His most popular pieces are the "Passpied", "Staccato Caprice", and "Valse Brilliante".

Life
Max Vogrich was born in Hermannstadt, Transylvania (now Sibiu, Romania) on 24 January 1852. A childhood prodigy, he was an acclaimed pianist at the age of 14 years. He studied at Leipzig under Carl Reinecke, Hans Richter, Moritz Hauptmann, and Ignaz Moscheles, completing the studies in 1869. From 1870 to 1878 he was engaged in concert tours throughout continental Europe, South America, and the United States. From 1882 to 1886 he was engaged in concert tours and teaching in Australia, after which he went to New York City, where he lived for some time. He died at Post Graduate Hospital there on 10 June 1916.

His works include the operas Vanda (1875), Lanzelot (1890), King Arthur (1893), and Buddha (1904); an oratorio, The Captivity (1891); the cantatas The Young King and the Sheperdess and The Diver; several masses, symphonies, violin and pianoforte concertos, and sonatas, besides duets, songs, and chamber music.

His piano concerto was one of the more substantial works composed, along with other orchestral works, which I have not heard before. It was titled 'Grosse concerto', a large-scale work that comprised of nearly 1500 bars of music.

I. Allegro maestoso
II. Intermezzo. Lento all'improviso
III. Allegro — Presto — A tempo giusto Allegro — Molto più moderato

2-piano score is readily available in IMSLP, but the full score survived in Royal Academy of Music Library, under MS 3901, which I had currently requested, and Darrel was more than willing to commit his time to simulate this neglected  masterwork.

Here is a polished sample of about 16% of the 1st movement, it was so long that it might take weeks to polish the whole.

[promusician]

2nd movement is done, a short intermezzo with style like Gershwin

[promusician]

Darrel has completed the simulation and uploaded to YT, video will be available in next 2 hours:

[Ilja]

An unevenly proportioned concerto. The combination of a very long first, intermezzo second, and fast third movement has been done before (Czerny, Urspruch, Sgambati and Gablenz, and doubtless others). In almost all cases, retaining tension in that 20+ minute-long first movement is an issue, and I think only Gablenz pulls it off by basically subdividing it into a mini-sub-concerto. It's no different with Vogrich, where the middle third of the first movement feels like a set of pasted improvisations, and totally lose me. That's a pity, because there are a lot of good ideas elsewhere.

The intermezzo is just that, very brief and rather inconsequential. However, the finale it leads up to is a real cracker. A very enjoyable and diverse piece of music that honestly deserves to be the finish of a more coherent concerto. However, despite all the caveats above I'll be returning to this piece (although perhaps secretly skipping the first movement) and I thank Promusician and Darrell for their work.

[JanOscar]

Uneven proportions are necessary when the material demands it. There is absolutely nothing negative about it, like in the three meals in a day
The 1st movement is by far the best imho.
A great job to bring this concerto to life, Thank you so much for all the efforts!

[Ilja]

It's for the composer to invent, select and shape the material, though; it's not something that rises up out of thin air. The result in that first movement, in this case, is a bit too self-indulgent for my taste. However, perhaps this is also an issue of a synthesized performance; in the hands of a really good pianist (like Vogrich himself) it might become something really special. Of course, concertos written by virtuoso pianists were largely written to display their specific skills.

[promusician]

Thanks for the comment sharing! Although it was not comparable to the greats, still worth a hearing! I have passed the scores of Boise and Colomer to Darrel and he will be working on those soon. Kufferath and Haarklou still in progress, and probably some short concertante works by Herz, Moscheles and Kalkbrenner that has not been recorded.

[eschiss1]

Supposedly though, the most brilliant and virtuoso of Mozart's concertos were not those he wrote for himself but those he wrote for his students.  There're always those annoying exceptions to supposedly obvious rules (Sorry)