Pianist and music teacher Artur Balsam was born in Warsaw on February 8, 1906. He attended the Helena Kijenska-Dobkiewiczowa Conservatory (now Academy) of Music established at the beginning of the 20th century in the Polish city of Lodz. After that he went to the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where he continued his studies with Artur Schnabel. A mere 12 years elapsed between his concert debut in 1918 and his success at the 1930 Berlin International Piano Competition; shortly after winning that competition, he was awarded the Mendelssohn Prize for chamber music in 1931 in Munich. Balsam matured into a sought-after partner at the piano: having won the Mendelssohn Prize together with the violinist Roman Totenberg, he toured the USA the following year with the brilliant young Yehudi Menuhin. After the rise to absolute power in Germany of Adolf Hitler at the head of his Nazi party, Balsam emigrated to the United States. He settled in New York in 1940, made a name for himself on the American chamber music scene and was the favorite accompanist of many famous soloists, especially in the years from 1940 to the early Seventies of the last century. He frequently partnered the great violinists Nathan Milstein and David Oistrakh, also playing for Joseph (violin) and Lillian (viola) Fuchs, Leonid Kogan (violin), Zino Francescatti (violin), Pierre Fournier (cello) and Mstislav Rostropovich (cello). Balsam was the pianist of the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini for five years. He was also a piano soloist for other leading orchestras.

Hélène Boschi’s repertoire was broad-based, ranging from the Baroque (François Couperin, Jean Philippe Rameau, Johann Sebastian Bach) to contemporary music. Her favorite composers of the Viennese Classical era were undoubtedly Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Schubert; strangely, it seems she left behind no Beethoven recordings. One notable fact about Boschi is that she was the first female pianist to record the works of Padre Antonio Soler (1729-1783), receiving the 1952 Grand Prix du Disque in honor of her achievement. As for the nineteenth century, her passionate readings of Schumann are of the utmost importance; but Carl Maria von Weber and Muzio Clementi also captured her attention, as did Frédéric Chopin and Emmanuel Chabrier and the Impressionists Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Modern classics were also integral to her repertoire – as were the works of her immediate contemporaries. Luigi Dallapiccola dedicated his 1952 piano composition Quaderno di Annalibera to Hélène Boschi, Claude Ballif paid her that honor with his Fourth Sonata op. 31

In the late-classical era, an Edinburgh publisher commissioned the most famous composers in continental Europe to orchestrate traditional Scottish folk songs in their original English. A lush sampling of this music is performed here by Makaris, a new early-music super-group headed by soprano Fiona Gillespie. (Olde Focus)

In the 250th Beethoven anniversary year, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has chosen this programme of works by contemporary composers to illuminate and contextualize Beethoven’s extraordinary output for piano. In his explanatory note for the album, the pianist writes: ‘Just as a mountain peak is always surrounded by other perhaps less lofty but no less fascinating summits, the major works of Beethoven are not isolated rock formations rising from the desert, but, as it were, “Himalayas”, forming part of a range in which other mountains might be the best pieces by contemporaries such as Clementi, Hummel, Dussek, and Wölfl. These composers all knew Beethoven well and were in contact with one another. It is essential to know and to make known their music in order better to understand and more thoroughly appreciate the lingua franca of the music of the time, which in turn is part and parcel of the “spirit of the age”, and to be aware of that which unites them, as well as to recognize that which differentiates them and renders each unique. In this year of plentiful Beethovenian commemorations, it appears to me natural, indeed essential, to pay admiring and enthusiastic homage to these composers, each of whom, in his own way, followed his route to the summit.’

REVIEWS:

Ostensibly, this disc is intended to present significant music by Beethoven's contemporaries, thus showing the musical climate of the day and making comparisons of style. All four of these composers knew each other and knew Beethoven well, and all were excellent pianists who composed many works for their instrument.

Joseph Wölfl is little known today but his E major sonata suggests he may be unjustly neglected. While this is not a profound work in any way, it is a fine one well worth your time. Bavouzet seems utterly on target in his choice of tempos, dynamics, accenting, rubato (which is limited) and other aspects of phrasing, and so it would be hard to imagine a better performance —or at least a significantly better performance - than this.

Muzio Clementi is far better known than Wölfl but this sonata, Op. 50, No. 1, despite having several recordings, is not among his more often performed keyboard works. To me, this is a vastly underrated sonata, one that clearly deserves greater attention. Overall, Bavouzet's tempos throughout the work tend to be on the brisk side but he captures the heart of the music, all its spirit, joys, sorrows and brilliance. A stunning performance!

The Hummel F minor Sonata is also rarely encountered in the concert hall, though it has gotten some attention on records. It begins with a dark theme of Romantic leanings, even bringing to mind Schumann and Chopin. But it turns to a more Classical manner when the tempo quickens, and throughout the first movement one notices this mixture of styles. The development section is quite stormy and the whole movement is very serious, at times grim. The second movement Adagio is weighty and again shows Hummel quite advanced stylistically for a work dating to around 1807. The Presto finale turns back to the Classical era, even using fragmentary material from the finale of the Mozart Jupiter Symphony.

The Dussek F-sharp minor Sonata is the most progressive of the works here in its expressive language. The first movement Introduction, marked Lento patetico, heralds some of the darker music of Liszt even. Dark indeed, as its dedication reads: “Harmonic Elegy on the Death of His Royal Highness Prince Louis-Ferdinand of Prussia.” In fact the whole work exudes a mournful character. The Tempo agitato music that follows the Introduction is brimming with angst and a pensive sort of sorrow. Angst also drives the second and final movement (Tempo vivace e con fuoco quasi presto). As its marking suggests, it is very fiery and driven. Overall, this must be regarded as a quite profound and rather original sonata, one that, as Bavouzet suggests in comments in the album notes, clearly has strong Romantic leanings well before the movement had begun.

In the Hummel and Dussek sonatas, Bavouzet is convincing in every way, again exhibiting the same virtues as in the preceding works. His dynamics, accenting and tempos always seem to fit, and he never sounds wayward or eccentric. He always infuses the music with spirit too, and in both cases he effectively unearths the music's forward-looking character, its auguring of the coming Romantic era.

The Chandos sound reproduction is vivid and well balanced, in the end yielding one of the finest sounding piano recordings I've heard in recent years. This recording is a winner, and thus if the repertoire appeals, you won't be disappointed by this fine CD.

– MusicWeb International (Robert Cummings)

Bavouzet’s keen intelligence and pristine musicianship are evident throughout, not least in his vivid delineation of the individual characters of these four composer-pianists. In Hummel’s overtly virtuoso Op 20 Sonata from 1807, Bavouzet’s focus is on its extraordinary pathos and startlingly original formal procedures. In the Andante cantabile, Bavouzet gives full vent to Wölfl’s unabashedly operatically inspired writing.

– Gramophone (Editor's Choice, July 2020)

A plunge among the sunken composers of Italian chamber music and the salvaged ones. The program recorded in this album is a ticket for a journey of a century and a half, that is the distance between the composition of the Sonata “con accompagnamento” by Muzio Clementi (1792) and its transformation into the Trio ortodosso by Alfredo Casella (1936). An intermediate stop is represented by the Trio op. 59 by Giuseppe Martucci (1882). The route of this journey retraces a history that is not unimportant or unsurprising: it summarises the significance and vicissitudes of the chamber music produced by Italian composers from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. In many texts of music history this topic is relegated in a note, or at most is dealt with in a paragraph, not even a chapter: an upgraded echo of the Fascist nationalism and dislike for Puccini that, for ideological reasons rather than for a historical or critical conviction, made themselves useful in raising the issue in the twentieth century. This recording, which presents a performance for piano, violin and cello, is a tiny artistic compensation, and an aesthetic and formal clarification. It leads us to consider and understand the role that Italian composers played also in the specific area of non-theatrical music.

The first part of the Douze Toccates by Hans Georg Nägeli was published in Zurich in 1808; there was no second part. On the title page, the composer conceals himself behind an “éditeur” of the same name. Prominent status, on the other hand, is given to the Répertoire des Clavecinistes, a series that ran from 1803 to 1805 in which Nägeli published a total of 15 volumes with works by Clementi, Steibelt, Dussek, Beethoven and others. The choice of “auteurs”, whose works he included in the Répertoire and to whom he dedicated the Toccates, reveals Nägeli’s view of the latest developments in music for the keyboard. Clementi and Beethoven in particular stand out for him as representatives of an era in which “contrapuntal writing is interwoven with artful display by the pianist”, as he writes in the “Announcement” of the Répertoire in the musical press. It is his aim that the Toccates should be understood as an observation on this turning-point in music history. There are therefore good reasons to combine Nägeli’s Toccates with works by Clementi and Beethoven on this release. Nägeli’s pieces enter into a historical context that is an integral part of the Toccates as aesthetic objects, not mere surroundings to them. We hear Nägeli’s pieces in Nägeli’s musical world and Nägeli’s musical world in the pieces. The musical portfolio of Els Biesemans has many aspects to it. After studying piano, organ and chamber music at the Lemmens-Institut in Leuven, Els Biesemans specialized in the varied keyboard styles of the 18th and 19th centuries at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. With a repertoire ranging from medieval music to the modern era, Els Biesemans is the recipient of numerous international awards.

Still today, an area of shadow, sorely in need of illumination, continues to surround the piano output of various composers living between the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries, indisputable protagonists at the keyboard and creators of new aesthetics in the period in which they lived, forgotten with their death and rarely considered by posterity if not within limited and unjust boundaries. They are considered almost unapproachable, even negligible, because of a critical vision incapable of seeing, broadly speaking, beyond the established triads: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven for Classicism, Chopin, Schumann and Liszt for early Romanticism. Thus, figures such as Cramer, Field, Czerny and Moscheles, who lived between the two centuries, and Hiller, Thalberg and Henselt, born in the 19th century, are eternally relegated to second place. Above all, however, justice is continued to be denied to Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) and Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837), who had a direct and not insignificant relationship with the above-mentioned trinities, especially the former, steadfastly holding their own and reciprocating their esteem, apart from certain disagreements seen in some of their letters, and teachers in turn of some of the misunderstood figures mentioned above. In this admirable recording, the pianist Sebastiano Mesaglio, sensitive and zealous re-evaluator of what the history of the piano has passed down to us, offers through an aptly chosen selection of sonatas the chance to gain a clear understanding of what Clementi and Hummel’s contemporaries thought of them, quite rightly, and what we in turn should think.

While Clementi’s sparkling music has been recorded by many celebrated pianists such as Arturo Benedetti MIchelangeli, few of them have paid much attention to the composer’s first published collection. This new recording by Carlo Alberto Bacchi is all the more welcome for being informed by his study of the composer’s complete oeuvre as part of the ‘Clementi Project’ which sees him performing many of the sonatas in concert as well as recording them for Piano Classics.

The inscription on Clementi’s tomb in Westminster Abbey commemorates him as ‘the father of the piano’. Clementi above all was responsible for devising a modern technique, of the kind still recognisable today, which would serve pianists on the larger instruments being manufactured in the early years of the 19th century. This technique is differentiated from harpsichord technique, and trained not just through lessons but through pianistic ‘methods’ and publications such as these sets of sonatas, which are arranged in order of progressive difficulty in order to introduced students to technical challenges step by step. Like Mozart, Clementi also manifested his musical talents at a very early age: at the age of 7, he was already studying organ, singing and counterpoint; he wrote a mass at the age of 11 and an oratorio at the age of 12.

The English nobleman and eccentric Sir Peter Beckford effectively bought the young Clementi on a seven-year contract and kept him at his West Country pile. When the contract with Beckford expired in 1774, Clementi moved to London and took off on a career that brought him fame across Europe – as a touring virtuoso, a teacher, publisher – and even sometimes composer. The six Op.1 sonatas were published in 1771, during Clementi’s period in service to Beckford. Although he was not yet 20 and almost completely self-taught, they show his mastery of material and his irrepressible invention. All the sonatas have a simple, playful and light-hearted character, and a two-movement form. The five Sonatas of Opus 1a, on the other hand, date from a decade later, even after the Op.6 Sonatas. They were published in Paris around 1781, and here we sense the stirrings of Clementi as ‘father of the piano’ in the cascades and doublings and expanded imagination.