Aloys Schmitt - Piano Concerto Op.76 (simulation)

[promusician]

I have made a re-simulation using noteperformer due to less than satisfactory rendering of sound samples in musescore. I have used back the same file Darrel did for his video, link here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnO9XcpLcxY

Huge efforts had been put in from getting the parts from Fleisher to notation input into musescore, so I would not like to waste his efforts. I tried my best to polish the music to make it more 'listenable', after that Darrel may  remaster his old videos when he is free.

1st movement:

[promusician]

Some history of this piece from Gary Galvan (curator of Fleisher music collection)

Most of what we know about Aloys Schmitt has been distilled from an 1873 biography in German written by Heinrich Hentel -the source of the engraved portrait here. A virtuosic keyboardist, Schmitt trained on keyboard and violin under composer, publisher, and Mozart expert John Anton Andre in Offenbach (1775-1842), and with Frankfurt composer J. G. Vollweiller in Frankfurt. Schmitt attained fame as a highly esteemed teacher, had students amongst the royal family in Berlin and also tutored Ferdinand Hiller.

Schmitt's compositional output comprises primarily piano works including studies, a method, and many pieces including sonatinas, rondos, and rhapsodies. In addition, he composed four operas, two oratorios, church music, and four piano concertos. Schmitt's editorial completion of Mozart's Mass in C minor has been posthumously discredited as stylistically inconsistent.

The Fleisher Collection purchased the set of parts for the first piano concerto, op. 76 -dedicated to a now obscure Frankfurt resident, Philipp Passavant- from a music antiquarian Ganley in the early 1960s. A Fleisher copyist constructed a complete conductor's score from these parts with the intent of producing a full performance set, but the project inexplicably folded, and the work soon disappeared into the archives. The printed parts and score were rediscovered in 1996 and catalogued in the Collection. The present set has been scanned from archival parts and the aforementioned score, cleaned up and reprinted for circulation.

[eschiss1]

RISM.info has 313 entries (not necessarily all different works, of course) under Aloys Schmitt, by the way. The first that shows up is an oratorio Moses, e.g. , then concerto Op.60 in a, ...
(It's a useful site...)
Also see this RISM entry of a concertino (by 1815-17, performed 1842?) HenS II.6 (the Henkel cataloguing system for Schmitt's works) in D major, I forget if we listed that one or if it's new to us...

[Gareth Vaughan]

RISM.info has 313 entries (not necessarily all different works, of course) under Aloys Schmitt, by the way.

Correct, Eric. But not all of them relate to the Aloys Schmitt we are discussing here. He has 272 entries. As you say, a useful resource nonetheless.

[eschiss1]

true, though the site does try to separate the entries that are known to belong to other composers of the same name into separate listings. However, the best they - and others - can sometimes do is guess. (Sometimes RISM's guesses are rather odd, as when they attribute something to a composer who was not yet born or long dead when a work was composed; but they are not alone in this.)