"Puntando sempre su una lettura contraddistinta da lucidità e brillantezza di tocco" — Riccardo Cassani
Recorded between March and July 2024, BIS is releasing a strongly thematically coherent album: the piano and orchestra in 20th-century Britain. Contrary to the indication provided on the cover, which places the largest and most demanding score, the Tippett Concerto, first, the compilation of the tracks on the album is strictly chronological. We begin with Walton's Sinfonia Concertante, written in 1927 (here, however, we hear in the 1943 revision), moving on to Britten's Diversions, composed in 1940 for Paul Wittgenstein, and concluding with Tippett's Piano Concerto, composed between 1953 and 1955.
We are therefore dealing with two youthful compositions, Walton and Britten, composed before the age of thirty, compared with a work of full maturity composed by a 50-year-old Tippett. Granted, this statement is not entirely true. Walton, in fact, composed the Sinfonia Concertante in 1927 with the idea of offering Diaghilev a ballet capable of reviving the glories of Petrushka, hence the presence of the piano. But after Diaghilev rejected the score, asserting that the 25-year-old Walton would be capable of writing something better within a few years, Walton adapted the work as a concert piece, which premiered in 1928 in London, performed by York Bowen and Ernest Ansermet.
In 1943, convinced of the need to revive a score whose success had not met expectations, he extensively revised the Symphony, simplifying the piano part and lightening the orchestration: essentially, as Walton himself wrote, "eliminating the piano!" Even in this form, the Sinfonia Concertante failed to break through, and in 1978 Walton even began to regret it, to the point that in a letter to biographer Stewart Craggs, he described the original version as "better and more interesting."
The discography of the Sinfonia Concertante essentially follows these same mood swings. While until the 1970s, only two recordings of the 1943 revision are available: Walton recorded them in 1948 and 1970, it wasn't until 1989 that Kathryn Stott and Vernon Handley (Conifer) released the first recording of the original version, which, for obvious reasons, became the edition of choice for pianists from that moment on. For this reason, if nothing else, the return of the 1943 revision presented on this disc should be welcomed with special consideration. Even from the aural point of view, this consideration must be confirmed, a consequence of the more lucid and geometric musical approach of the Hammond/Vass duo, which recalls more strongly the inspiration of the original Stravinsky-derived work, especially when compared with the two more lyrical and effusive recordings conducted by Walton. For comparison, I suggest the second stereo recording from 1970, recorded for Lyrita with Peter Katin as soloist. Even the genesis of Benjamin Britten's Diversions (a cycle of 12 Variations on an original theme) is marked by some difficulties, but in this case not attributable to the composer himself, but rather to his patron, pianist Paul Wittgenstein, convinced that, because I spend my money, the music should serve his greater glory and not that of the composer.
Britten was luckier than Hindemith, who in 1922 unwisely handed over his Klaviermusik mit Orchester to Wittgenstein, guaranteeing him lifetime exclusive rights to perform it. The result was that, not being to the pianist's liking, the score received its first performance only after the death of Wittgenstein's widow in 2001. At the first performance, held in Philadelphia in 1942, Britten had the bitter surprise of "hearing Wittgenstein ruin my Diversions" with the insertion of cadenzas that, in the pianist's intentions, were meant to showcase his "qualities," which, between us, were mediocre according to the recordings that have survived, as a one-handed pianist. When the rights expired in 1950, Britten was able to publish an official score, stripped of the changes he had officially recorded with Julius Katchen in 1954. This new recording by Clare Hammond fits equally well into a discography that, though not extensive, has featured virtuosi of the caliber of Leon Fleisher, Peter Donohoe, and Steven Osborne. Always focusing on a reading characterized by lucidity and brilliance of touch, Hammond perhaps loses something in the arpeggiated poetry of the Nocturne, but finds in the more complex passages an ideal terrain for showcasing her ability to play on differences in articulation and touch. Composed with Walter Gieseking's performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in mind, Tippett's Piano Concerto seeks to recreate the same balance between classicism and expressive lyricism in the harmonic context of the mid-1950s.
Written with his friend Noel Mewton-Wood in mind, who died in a car accident in December 1953, the Concerto was premiered by Louis Kentner after Julius Katchen withdrew, declaring the piano part unplayable. Indeed, Tippett himself would later lament the loss of musical meaning due to the difficulty in reading individual notes, and the concerto would have to wait almost 10 years to find, in John Ogdon, the pianist capable of doing it justice. The limitation of the old EMI recording from 1963 lies in the unresolved dialogue between Ogdon and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis, not without its difficulties and fractures, which the collaboration between the Hammond and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Vass does not present. A disc, therefore, absolutely recommended also for the quality of the audio recording, which allows one to clearly appreciate the polyphonic and harmonic interweavings of complex scores.