This admirable recital forms a sequel to Stephen Hough's Gramophone Award-winning Chandos disc of the A minor and B minor Piano Concertos (4/87). And although the music is less enticing and substantial, the performances less exuberantly virtuosic and elegantly inflected, these are decorous rarities played with an assured brilliance and affection. Hummel's Mozartian rather than Chopinesque bias declares itself most obviously in his Op. 73 Concertino, though even here, at 315" for example, the figuration has a recognizably Hummelian froth and sparkle. Too charming to be vacuous, such surface brio has little in common with Mozart's depth and subtlety, and for music of greater romantic range and ambition we turn to the A flat Concerto (music briefly in Jorge Bolet's repertoire), with its fuller scoring and lavishly decorated solo part. Lovers of a finespun, operatic cantilena will warm to the central "Romanze" and find the final Rondo alla Spagniola, even when it outstays its welcome, more than a prophecy of Chopin's E minor Concerto.

The Gesellschafts Rondo (offered here in a premiere recording) commences in solemn Adagio vein before turning to a more typically bustling and ceremonious Vivace. It may be that Hummel "puffed, blew and perspired" when he played but he won the admiration of Chopin (a hard master to please and one who turned Hummel's animation to rare poetic advantage) and his sheer style is infectious when projected with such unfailing expertise by Howard Shelley in his dual role as pianist and conductor of the London Mozart Players. The recordings are exceptionally well balanced, the acoustic pleasingly spacious.

-- Gramophone [1/1995]

HUMMEL: Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3

Classical Music

Ear-tickling Hummel unearthed

Last month’s One To Watch comes good in this lovely disc of Hummel rarities. Christopher Hinterhuber is terrific in these works, and seems to be fast becoming a Naxos favourite. That label also works its old and much-appreciated trick of unearthing a really excellent but little-hyped band in the Gävle Symphony Orchestra of Sweden.

-- Gramophone [2/2008]

The four concertante pieces on this imaginative disc were written between 1820 and 1833, primarily as vehicles to show off Hummel's virtuosity at the keyboard. He wrote The Return to London in celebration of his return to the capital after 40 years - and the visit was a triumph. The jaunty main rondo theme prompts a sequence of free variations punctuated by improvisatory passages.

The Variations and Finale offers a similar free formula, again with a breezy main theme, while Oberons Zauberhorn ("Oberon's Magic Horn") uses material from Weber's opera which was being performed at the time. Surprisingly little of Weber's material is involved but it makes a colorful piece with a strikingly dramatic opening and with a storm sequence full of tremolos and horn fanfares. The Variations in F date from 1820, a simpler set, well varied, with a cadenza near the end and an emphatic close.

Christoper Hinterhuber, who has already recorded piano music by CPE Bach for Naxos, is a first-rate soloist, accompanied by the Gävle Symphony Orchestra, one of the oldest in Sweden, under its German music director Uwe Grodd. An excellent disc of long-buried rarities, well-worth hearing.

--Review by Edward Greenfield, Gramophone, February 2008

This is the second volume in Chandos’s series devoted to the masses of Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837), following on a stirring recording of masses in D and B flat (CHAN 0681). The only competition for this E??Mass with which I am familiar is a Koch Schwann recording led by Martin Haselbock (317792) and I find somewhat more energy and an improved sense of shaping here from Hickox.

The problem for me is that this is decent, good, pleasant music—but not more than that. I find a bit more of a creative spark in the two masses on the earlier recording, but to my ears, none of this music has about it the originality and depth of Hummel’s best piano music. When one hears one of his piano concertos (particularly those in B Minor and A Minor), one hears a distinctive voice—music that stays in the memory after the sounds have ended. His piano music may not have about it the greatness of stature of Beethoven or Chopin (between whom he was an interesting stylistic bridge), but it is music of presence, music of immediate appeal and lasting impact. To my ears, at least, the same cannot be said for his religious music.

The E flat?Mass was composed in 1804, and is apparently one of the first important works by the composer after he became Konzertmeister at the Esterhazy court, taking over the Kapellmeister title after Haydn’s death in 1809. (Hummel left the court in 1811, and was not replaced—the beginning of the end of the importance of music at the court). Hummel was considered by contemporaries to be one of the most important musicians of his time, and he was a prolific composer in many forms. But when set against the religious choral works of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and even Schumann or Mendelssohn, the music on this disc pales, its impression evaporating almost immediately after it sounds.

The strongest work is actually the Gradual “Quod in orbe,” probably written for the Esterhazy court in 1806. It is scored for chorus and orchestra (no soloists), and has an energy and spark about it that raises it above the rest of the music here. The weakest music is found in the Te Deum, a 10-minute piece that even Chandos’s annotator describes as “one dimensional.”

Hickox does all he can with the music, shaping it tautly and eliciting involved, spirited singing and playing. The soloists are excellent, Chandos’s recorded sound is what we’ve come to expect from the company—rich, warm, reverberant, but not muddy. Informative notes and full texts accompany the disc.

Henry Fogel, FANFARE

HUMMEL: Sonata for Mandolin and Fortepiano / Flute Sonata /

Hummel’s lasting importance – according to Grove, “he clearly linked the styles of Clementi and Mozart, in a line that bypassed Beethoven, with those of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, early Liszt and Schumann” – is triumphantly confirmed by this recital. Moreover, these enthusiastic and committed performances show Hummel’s music to be not only significant but also interesting and enjoyable. Lisa Daoust and Carmen Picard winningly convey the exuberance and simple melodic charm of the G major Flute Sonata; and revel in the D major Sonata’s delightful technical display. Occasional breathiness – most notably in the lower register – sometimes blurs the flute’s focus; but generally sensitive balance engagingly demonstrates the equal dialogue between the two instruments. The A major Flute Sonata is especially appealing. Here, Daoust and Picard aptly shape the first movement’s overt brilliance to convey its beguilingly proto-romantic expression. They sensitively match the second movement’s charming opposition of fragmentary flute melody and smooth piano accompaniment and capture all the wit of the rondo finale’s opera buffa character.

The Grand Rondeau Brillant continues in theatrical mood with a dramatic introduction that blossoms into music of passionate tenderness and elegant virtuosity, after which both players launch exultantly into the rondo’s buoyant melodiousness. To conclude, Elizabeth Dolin joins Daoust and Picard in a fine account of the A major Trio, whose shimmering tremolos in its final variation and closing rondo vividly evoke Schubert’s spirit. This fascinating issue will have a wide appeal, particularly at super-bargain price.

-- Gramophone [12/1996]

Not all new music is new, or, to put it differently, music is only as old as when you last heard it (or even knew about it). When I attend concerts these days, I am just as likely to decry the repetitive programming of worn chestnuts as I am to condemn the absence of newly commissioned contemporary pieces. It is always satisfying to discover a ?new? old composer, and I am certainly not the first explorer to place a flag into the distant territory of Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778?1837). But imagine my surprise when I was unable to find an easily accessible comparable recording of his fantasias for piano. Fortunately, comparison may not be necessary, as this CD is incomparable. How many times have you heard a world premiere recording of a piece written in 1833? This is Hummel?s Fantasie in G Minor, op. 123. Living composers take note: it may take 173 years for your piece to be digitized, giving new meaning to the words ?patience,? ?posthumous,? and ?new.?


The last time I thought much about Hummel was as a young piano student struggling with his pieces. So let?s briefly review for those of you who, like me, are not completely fresh on your Hummelology: Mozart taught the young prodigy for two years for free. Considering that Mozart was at the same time hitting up friends for ducats, this is a testament to Mozart?s generosity, to Hummel?s genius, or both. On the advice of Mozart, Hummel?s father took him on a four-year tour of Europe, similar to Mozart?s own traveling university. Hummel studied piano and composition with Salieri, Clementi, and Haydn. Nice home schooling, huh? He became a major force in music of his day, materially more successful than Mozart, inspiring the likes of Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt. Chopin placed Hummel next to Mozart on his pantheon of greats.


The Fantasie in G Minor begins with a stately introduction, followed quickly by an exquisite theme, ?The Hunter?s Song.? It?s a dance in which Classical style partners with the emergence of Romanticism. Madoka Inui?s playing is crisp and articulate and always delicate. The following Marcia has a tongue-in-cheek quality, with arch variations. Though history has relegated Hummel to a less-than-Mozart purgatory, his music here has an elegant restraint and simplicity that perhaps deserves more credit and less comparison with others. Taken on its own terms, Hummel?s music is both gorgeous and intricate, without being opaque.


The Fantasie in E ? , op. 18 begins with a mysterious Lento burgeoning into a coy Allegro con fuoco , played by Inui with deft dramatic choices and swift clear dynamic change-ups, spare use of pedal, and great understanding of the consistent line that runs through all the musical revelations. The following Larghetto , by the way, is one of the most beautiful nostalgic themes you?ll ever hear, resembling, as it does, a sumptuous Mozart aria. In fact, it borders on Chopinesque to such an extent that we can understand Chopin?s adulation (and emulation).


The Rondo quasi una fantasia is also operatic in style, though in a cocoon of Classicism. ?La contemplazione? from Six Bagatelles, op. 107, has a sad quality, perhaps owing to the key of A ? , which has been known to make grown men cry into their beers. The last two selections are fantasias on other composers? themes, the first Paganini, and the second based on Mozart?s ?Non più andrai.? These fantasias are spare and graceful, charming without being sycophantish. Hummel prided himself on knowing the difference between a fantasia and an improvisation, though his fantasias benefit from an improvisational, that is, imaginative style.


This CD is indisputably a keeper, and Madoka Unui will be recognized as one of the greats, hopefully sooner than Hummel got his due for op. 123. Recording piano is not always easy, but this CD provides an excellent example of how to record the piano without making it sound electronic. I cringe to think my collection would be lacking this digital gem. I also wonder (hope) if there may be other Hummels or Inuis waiting in the wings, but I doubt I could be so lucky a second time.


FANFARE: David Wolman

Naxos continues its championing of Hummel with a disc that regrettably also serves as an in memoriam to that fine British violinist Micaela Comberti, one of whose final recordings this must have been. She died at the early age of fifty-one.

We’ve come to admire Hummel’s concertante works recently and recordings of his choral music have opened up hitherto under-explored areas, greatly to our advantage. In fact it might be argued that we are now moving away from Hummel the virtuoso keyboard exponent, so beloved by pianists of the Golden Age, to a reflective transitional period in which his large-scale choral works are increasingly taking their place on the fringes of the canon. And not before time.

Which is not to overlook the reams of chamber music that he wrote throughout his life, and which is the raison d’être of this new release. Hummel was a gloriously fluent composer but that very articulacy could sometimes lead to a preponderance of note-spinning, repetition and a surfeit of what one might call concertante bluffness. That’s certainly the case here but only from time to time.

The Piano Quartet was published posthumously in 1839 and is cast in two movements. There is some languorous phraseology in the opening Andante cantabile, even if the fortepiano does sound rather recessed in this recording spectrum but there’s a concerto-sized Allegro to contrast with it. The string players provide the cushion – and the tuttis – for the sturdily striding piano part – all very attractive if not especially distinctive. The much earlier G major Piano Trio is a suavely laid out three-movement work that reveals Hummel’s consummate professionalism. The over-long opening movement is followed by a Minuet, with plenty of gusto in this performance as Susan Alexander-Max detonates some left-hand fortepiano fillips amidst a certain amount of trenchancy. The Rondo finale is light-hearted with a sparkling piano part - naturally, as Hummel was a leading virtuoso on the instrument - a sliver of a fugato, and a certain Beethovenian feel to some of the piano writing.

In 1826 Hummel completed a Cello Sonata, a big work, romantic, spacious and immediately attractive. The piano part has a touching nobility of expression, but also a welcome incision, one that here tends very occasionally to over-balance the more reticent cello in passagework. Again the material can be over-stretched but it hardly lacks for melodic interest, not least in the lied of the Romance, which possesses a suave beauty - the word ‘suave’ tends to rise unbidden when thinking of Hummel - but also a contrasting declamatory section. Easy-going, and full of strongly accented figures, Banda and Alexander-Max do well by the folk-like pages of the finale in particular, and they complete a successful traversal with a degree of panache.

The F major Trio is the earliest work here, dating from 1807, and reveals the powerful influence of Haydn. From the gemütlich opening, the unrolling fugal passages - which soon give up the ghost - and the variational second movement, this is very much in the Viennese tradition, solidly classical and topped by a fashionable - or maybe just past it - Turkish Rondo finale.

The sonorities evoked by the well-versed ensemble of baroque instrument practitioners are most attractive and add a certain tangy frisson. Sometimes the recording in Weston Parish Church loses a degree of focus and string instruments can be over-balanced by the fortepiano but this doesn’t happen too often. Spirited and lyrical, though not invariably convincing, this is another feather in the Naxos Hummel cap.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

HUMMEL: Bassoon Concerto / Clarinet Quartet

Following on from her debut album impressions, featuring chamber music for bassoon and piano, bassoon player Sophie Dervaux is poised to release her second album on the Berlin Classics label. This album marks two premieres: in addition to this being the very first recording of the Concerto no. 2 in C major for bassoon and orchestra by Johann Baptist Vanhal, Ms Dervaux performs as both soloist and conductor of the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg. The recording of Mozart’s Concerto in B flat major for bassoon and orchestra was the starting point for this present album. It is acknowledged to be one of the most important works ever written for the wind instrument: composed in the Viennese Classical style, sophisticated and nuanced- and the only bassoon concerto by Mozart to have survived. “The Concerto in B flat major forms the basis for many bassoonists’ repertoire,” Sophie Dervaux explains, “and for that reason I have long waited to record the work – it is an important step along my career path and I faced up to it with respect.” What can be paired on an album alongside a work that enjoys the huge significance of Mozart’s bassoon concerto? Sophie Dervaux has chosen two composers who were close to Mozart and who share a common history with him. Vanhal and Hummel, like Mozart, all left their mark on the musical history of Vienna- the city in which Sophie Dervaux, as solo bassoonist with the Vienna Philharmonic has chosen to make her home.

Two years after the great acclaim aroused by Beethoven and his Contemporaries, his first recording for Arcana (‘Young Raffaele La Ragione is to the mandolin today what Gustav Leonhardt once was to the harpsichord’ - Le Monde), Raffaele La Ragione returns with an album containing the four best-known mandolin concertos, which appear in a new light here thanks to the use of three different period mandolins. For this ambitious project he is joined by the brilliant orchestra Il Pomo d’Oro, universally renowned for its lively, dynamic interpretations of instrumental and vocal music from the Baroque and Classical periods (with Joyce DiDonato, Franco Fagioli, Jakub Józef Orlinski) and directed here by its principal guest conductor Francesco Corti, a harpsichordist of international repute. From Vivaldi’s famous mandolin concertos, by way of the typically Neapolitan examples by Paisiello and Lecce, to the two more Classical concertos of Hummel (these last in their world premiere recording on historical instruments), four concertos and three precious instruments restore this repertory to its rightful place and relate almost a century of mandolin history.

Recorded in: All Saints' Church, Tooting, London 22,23 September 1986 Producer(s) Brian Couzens Sound Engineer(s) Trygg Tryggvason Ralph Couzens [Assistant]

This is Volume 3 in Centaur's cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Hummel, performed by Antonio Pompa-Baldi. This cycle is setting a very high bar for complete Hummel sonata cycles. Born and raised in Foggia, Italy, Antonio Pompa-Baldi won the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 1999 and embarked on a career that continues to extend across five continents. He also won a silver medal at the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition, as well as a bronze medal at the 1998 Marguerite Long Competition in Paris. The New York Times described his playing as “meltingly beautiful.” Pompa-Baldi founded the Todi International Music Masters Festival, of which he is artistic director and faculty member, and sits on the juries of the most prestigious piano competitions in the world.

The Missa Solemnis is a worthy successor to the late Haydn Masses. It's brilliant orchestration, inventive and flexible choral writing and technical resourcefulness are the work of an experienced and gifted composer. While the work obviously owes much to the example of the late Haydn Masses it is no pale, bloodless imitation. The Kyrie is a deeply satisfying movement. The Grave opening is at once highly dramatic and yet firmly rooted in the long and distinguished Viennese tradition of C major festive Masses. In contrast, the quiet opening of the succeeding Allegro moderato, scored for winds alone, is an astonishingly modern touch. The choral writing is lyrical but not without it's moments of drama; the accompaniment, which benefits enormously from Hummel's brilliant handling of his orchestral forces, infuses the Kyrie with tremendous drive and verve. The Te Deum is an immensely attractive work. The orchestration blazes with bright primary colors and the choral writing is fluid and attractive. Although relatively short in duration, the Te Deum contains moments of great emotional gravity as well as pure transcendent joy. If indeed Hummel did compose the work to celebrate the Peace of Pressburg, one might argue that the Alliance's defeat at Austerlitz received a far greater musical memorial than did Wellington's victory at the Battle of Vittoria a few years later.