Listen, too, to the two cd recordings of Holbrooke's piano music by a Greek pianist - whose name I have no reason to attempt to memorise other than to avoid listening to any of his other work - who does his best to ignore about 90% of Holbrooke's detailed markings concerning dynamics, tempo, articulation, character etc., and produces -to my mind at least - a travesty of what the composer intended. Holbrooke's piano music is not widely known or performed and scores not generally accessible so the performer has to be relied upon to present it in its best possible light to reveal its quality to an audience unfamiliar with it.
Some will probably remember that great entertainer Liberace playing music by "Mom's favourite composer, Frederic Showpan" in performances which must have been as far from what Chopin imagined in character as it is possible to be.
We might also remember some of those deadly-dull and leaden performances of Baroque music that were still around in the 1960s before performers began to brush away the cobwebs and which were unlikely to endear anybody to the composers of the period who had little interest in them to begin with.
The Liszt E flat concerto has long been used as a vehicle by virtuosi and has acquired a number of accretions of performing traditions that don't really appear in the score. It's a measure of the quality of the music that it has survived all this and remains a well-loved (by many, at least) part of the regular repertoire.
The quality or greatness of the pianist has nothing to do with it. The music does.
Plenty of great pianists have looked at the Rachmaninoff concertos in a similar way. Arrau at least played Nr.3 in the 1940s, though. Both Leonard Bernstein and Robert Simpson held shocking views on Rachmaninoff really.
I certainly acknowledge the widespread dislike of Heldenleben. Incomprehensible to me, but very widely shared nevertheless.
Maybe if you'd heard Artur Rubinstein -who praised the work fulsomely in his autobiography - play it you might have thought differently. If it really was trite and unmusical I don't think we'd still be hearing it almost two hundred years after its first performance when Berlioz conducted it.
In the days when I could I played both Liszt concertos and found them very rewarding both musically and from the pianistic point of view. But, hey, the likes of Richter, Berman, Brendel and a host of others could have told you that.
It seems that one man's meat is another man's poison and, although I don't dislike the work by any means, given the choice between Ein Heldenleben and the Liszt Concertos to take to a desert island I'm afraid Richard Strauss would find himself (in this instance) part of the flotsam and jetsam floating in the ocean.
I really don't object to the exclusion of Liszt at all. I heard the Liszt Nr.1 last year at the Proms and even Yuja Wang couldn't convince me the piece is nothing but trite, unmusical rubbish.
It was an excruciating 20-minutes just to hear Ein Heldenleben in the second half.
Oh Dear! Classic FM have now published a list of the 'Twenty Best Piano Concertos of All Time'. Again, as in their list of best symphonies, there are surprising exclusions (no Liszt, for example) and inclusions (Florence Price and Clara Schumann, as well as Nigel Hess). Given his frequent presence on Classic FM schedules, I am sure that a place is reserved in the future for Einaudi - should he ever write a concerto.
Following on from this latest list, I assume that we can look forward to 'the Best Violin Concertos of All Time'. My guess is that this will almost certainly include one or both of the Concertos of Florence Price.
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