Carl Czerny found a continuing source of inspiration in the music of his teacher Beethoven, even after he had established himself with a series of influential pedagogic works, piano exercises and studies. His works for piano trio show a flair for vivacious themes and unusual rhythms, such as the Spanish bolero in the second of the ‘Deux Trios brillants, Op. 211’ as well as opportunities for brilliant display, notably for the pianist. The ‘Trois Sonatines, Op. 104’ are equally lively, showing a transitional style that bridges the period from Mozart to Liszt. Dr. Sun-Young Gemma Shin is an active performer on both Baroque and modern violin as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestra leader. She is presently associate concertmaster of the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra. Benjamin Hayek completed his bachelor and MM degrees in cello performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Hayek is active as a modern cellist in addition to his frequent appearances as a Baroque cellist. Dr. Samuel Gingher is active as a solo and collaborative pianist, and has performed in piano and chamber festivals all over the world. He is currently a faculty member at Millikin University in Illinois.

Carl Czerny’s instructional exercises may be his lasting legacy but there remain numerous largely forgotten pieces that reveal important elements of his compositional range. The four Romantic Fantasies named after Sir Walter Scott’s famous Waverley novels are piano duets of epic breadth. In them Czerny ingeniously develops popular Scottish melodies, including the use of the ‘Scotch snap’, to generate a vivid programmatic quality that explores numerous genres. Scherzos, fugal passages, chorales and marches are all featured, and raise the music – full of beauty, virtuosity and unpredictability – to orchestral proportions.

REVIEW:

Though the majority of Czerny's more than 800 works were for solo piano, there were also works intended for use in public concerts, such as the four Romantic Fantasies for piano duet composed in 1832. Each is of sizeable proportions and based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott, Czerny having been an avid reader. They used the stories that were recounted in Waverley, Guy Mannering, Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, and in his thematic material he appropriately used Scottish and English traditional melodies. Technically they are highly demanding, particularly in the many mercurial passages for the right hand of the ‘Primo’ pianist, and proved a very testing time for Pei-I Wang in Waverley. The second Fantasy, in a mood of quiet suspense, leads to the military atmosphere that opens Ivanhoe, and finally he cast Rob Roy as a weighty finale. Mid-way through the disc the North American-based duo exchange places, Samuel Gingher becoming the ‘Primo’, the young duo here offering World Premiere Recordings made in 2019. A discovery that has given me considerable pleasure.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

For the third time Kolja Lessing, one of the most versatile musicians of our times, dedicates himself to the multifaceted composer Carl Czerny and specifically to his Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte op. 200 (Systematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Pianoforte). “If a finely written musical work can be compared to a noble architectural edifice in which symmetry must predominate, then a successful fantasy is a beautiful English garden, seemingly without rules but brimming with surprising variety and intelligibly, meaningfully, and planfully executed.” It was with this poetic comparison that Czerny, writing in the introduction to his Anleitung zum Fantasieren, characterized the nature of improvisation, contrasting it with a composition elaborated in writing. It is scarcely surprising that Czerny, quite early marked by many years of the closest contact with his mentor Beethoven and his unique art of improvisation, presented this compendium in 1829 in his effort to grasp music encyclopedically. As an instructive work, it systematizes all the different kinds of improvisation then in use and illustrates them with numerous models, often ones honed with the finest artistry. In his compendium Czerny addressed the knowledgeable, technically uncommonly well-versed player. In his accompanying texts he refers to models that at the time were almost completely unknown such as Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue, to exemplary works by his contemporaries Beethoven, Clementi, Hummel, and Moscheles, and even to his own publications in respect of each improvisational genre. It is thus that Czerny’s op. 200 offers fascinating insights into the musical practice of the early nineteenth century at the crossroads between Classicism and Romanticism – while he himself already belongs to the Romantic period by virtue of his encyclopedic thought bringing together all the epochs of music history.

Composers are often tasked with creating from a void, an emptiness. The blank page is an easel. The parts of a structure of a piece of music – melody, accompaniment, line, harmony, tension, and release – must take shape to reach the listener’s ear. Sometimes, instead of starting with an empty sheet of staff paper, a composer creates something which is pollinated by another source. Perhaps it is a folk song, a poem, a melody, or an even larger work, such as a full-length opera. New works are then realized. In the case of this two-cd set, an East South African folk tune receives new life as a romantic piano ballade. A sonnet of Petrarch resurfaces centuries later as a dramatic declaration of love, through a solo piano work. The repertoire on these discs traces Kristin Ditlow’s own growth as a pianist and musician. Each work marks a chapter of her development and artistry to the present. The song transcriptions are pieces that have been played countless times with vocal partners: the operatic works are works that she has coached or conducted. Her passionate pursuit of travel is also a thread which weaves throughout the discs: the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor spiritual arrangements are works that she became acquainted with as a high school choral accompanist: meeting her husband while on tour in China in 2012: the Mongolian Shepherd Song is her arrangement of a traditional folksong from the Chinese Mongolian community, a work introduced to her by her husband in China originally for erhu and pipa (traditional Chinese instruments) accompaniment but transcribed for violin and piano. Kristin Ditlow has spent five summers performing, teaching, and coaching in Hungary and the Bartók selections all harken back to those times in the Hungarian countryside. Pianist, coach and conductor Dr. Kristin Ditlow dedicates her musical career to collaboration and connection. She has been seen in concert throughout North America, Mainland China, and Western Europe as a soloist, collaborative pianist, and conductor. The set of music pieces in this album is representative of her “Passages” in her career.

Few composers are as well known and at the same time as infamous as Carl Czerny. This is mainly due to a few collections of etudes, which were used almost excessively by some piano teachers, at least in the past, to train finger technique. The actual exercises and etudes make up only a tenth of his oeuvre, which comprises over 2000 works, of which 861 are available in print. With these numbers, it must still be taken into account that each opus can consist of up to 50 individual pieces. The largest part of his oeuvre, almost half, must be counted as arrangements.

The "Quatuors Concertants" op. 230 and op. 816 also belong to this genre, although the main titles do not indicate this and the instrumentation for four pianos with eight hands places them above the usual arrangements. The two titles "1er Quatuor Concertant op. 230" and "2me Quatuor Concertant op. 816" indicate that these pieces were intended for the concert hall. The "Quatuor Concertant op. 230" was performed on 4 April 1830 for the benefit of the victims of a Danube flood in the k.k. great Redouten-Saal in Vienna, together with the Semiramis Overture by G. Rossini, which Czerny had arranged for eight pianos with 32 hands (see CD "Up to 8 pianos"). The attractiveness of this concert was further enhanced by the fact that only aristocratic pianists, and especially female pianists, performed.

Much of Carl Czerny’s concert music for piano was considered ‘wild and almost unplayable’ in his day, but these world premiere recordings reveal inspired melodic writing, great skill in orchestration and colourful virtuoso challenges in a programme that includes his final Concertino, Op. 650. This is the final release in the Naxos edition of works for piano and orchestra by Czerny. Previous releases can be heard on 8.573998, 8.573688, 8.573417 and 8.573254.