This is a wonderfully passionate miniature at the heart of the Op. 52 collection; it awaits a commercial recording.
This blog shares my activities as a pianist, harpsichordist, teacher and singer in Edinburgh, Scotland. I welcome enquiries if you are looking for a pianist or harpsichordist for your exam, recital, evening of entertainment. I studied as a musicologist, and as a writer specialise in baroque music (I am the chap who recently discovered a Vivaldi flute concerto in a Scottish archive!). As a performer my interests range widely from Monteverdi to interwar 'light' music and much in between.
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Moritz Moszkowski - in praise of *Sechs Phantasiestucke*
I am keen on a number of pianist-composers of the late nineteenth-century, but one whom I feel has been particularly unjustly neglected is Moritz Moszkowski. Earlier this week I came across a digest of Donald Macleod’s ‘Composer of the Week’ programme from over a year ago that was devoted to him:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gs8qj
It’s great to see Moszkowski getting some advocacy, which has been left to only a handful of pianists to date and no scholars. The programme offered a generous sample of, by and large, the composer’s better-known pieces -- inevitably, since the majority simply have not been recorded. It is clear, however, that the lens through which this music is viewed remains strongly influenced by its reception in the early twentieth century when the composer’s reputation went into steep decline. The accusation that Moszkowski was essentially a purveyor of light ‘salon’ music came into focus at this time. The early modernists began promoting their new ethos of 'thorough-going seriousness' in artistic endeavour, creating a dividing line between themselves and the ‘old guard’.
A sense of the composer’s modernism in the 1890s is gained from several of the solo piano collections such as *Sechs Phantasiestucke*, Op. 52, from which the famous ‘Die Jongleurin’ (‘La Jongleuse’/ ‘The Juggleress’) comes, and *Tristesses et Sourires* (the title of an 1883 novel by Antoine Gustave Droz), Op. 58, described on its delightful period-piece title page as a ‘Collection Nouvelle de Musique Etrangere Moderne’. I am particularly struck by the quality of *Sechs Phantasiestucke*, a title suggestive of the influence of Schumann (recalling the title of his Op. 12), and indeed the music lives up to this expectation -- filtered through Moszkowski’s highly distinctive pianistic style. Only ‘Die Jongleurin’ has been recorded as far as I’m aware (which, divorced from the collection as a whole, becomes simply a novelty), yet these are six richly varied pieces that show a seriousness of intent within the context of the late nineteenth-century.
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