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The Romantic Piano Concerto, Vol. 74 on CD

William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875) enjoyed the advantage of a musical family. His grandfather, John Bennett (1754-1837), was a lay vicar at King’s, Trinity and St John’s Colleges in Cambridge (when the lay clerks and organist served all three colleges), and his son Robert (1788-1819), William’s father, entered the choir at King’s as a chorister before becoming an articled pupil of the organist, John Clarke-Whitfield. Accepting a post at Sheffield Parish Church in 1811, Robert fathered three children among which was one son, William Sterndale, born in 1816 and named after a close friend who had provided words for some of his solo songs. After the premature deaths of his mother in 1818, and his father (who had married again) in 1819, William went to live with his grandparents in Cambridge where his grandfather was still active as a lay clerk. His musicality was soon recognized and, after joining the choir of King’s in February 1824, William entered the Royal Academy of Music at the age of ten on the recommendation of the Provost of King’s, George Thackeray, who considered him a prodigy. At first the young Bennett tried his hand at the violin, but he quickly turned to the piano on which he began to excel, and by 1828, when he was only twelve, he was already appearing as a soloist at the RAM in a piano concerto by Dussek. Studies in composition began with the RAM’s first Principal, William Crotch, but though Crotch was undoubtedly a man of intellect with a catholicity of interests, his musical purview was severely circumscribed and seems to have exerted a stultifying influence on Bennett. Until 1831 his progress as a student composer had been limited, but after he transferred to the new Principal, Cipriani Potter, in 1832 Bennett’s whole demeanour changed radically. By the end of 1832, buoyed up by his advanced piano technique and Potter’s more contemporary view of the piano concerto, he embarked on the composition of his Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor, Op 1, a work which, for its formal self-assurance, the fluency of its style and scope, and the brilliance of its young executant, was to astonish all those who heard it. The work quickly received five performances: first in Cambridge (on 28 November 1832), at the Hanover Square Rooms in London (30 March 1833), twice in Windsor for Queen Adelaide (in April 1833), and again at the Hanover Square Rooms (26 June 1833) where we know that Mendelssohn, who was in the audience, was greatly taken by the talent of the young Englishman. The concerto’s publication at the behest of the Academy Committee undoubtedly acted as a major spur towards Bennett’s career as a virtuoso pianist-composer, even though he never again chose to play it in its entirety in public.

The model for Bennett’s piano concertos has often been given as Mozart. In some ways this is not surprising. Bennett greatly admired Mozart; there are numerous stylistic elements of his music which point to Mozartian influence; and Bennett was himself a keen executant of Mozart’s piano concertos which, during the 1830s, were performed more frequently than they had been in the years after their composer’s death. Nevertheless, the paradigm for the opening movement of Bennett’s first piano concerto was not Mozart but the prevailing tendency of the ‘London Piano School’, many of whose most earnest exponents, such as Cramer, Moscheles and Potter, taught at the RAM. Smaller than the ritornello of Mozart’s K466 in D minor, the opening orchestral introduction lasts only sixty-five bars, yet Bennett cleaved to the process of two distinct thematic ideas, with a third providing the coda material. The first idea, in D minor, is, as Geoffrey Bush has remarked, ‘the D minor of Don Giovanni’, and the bold gesture of the I-Vb progression that opens Bennett’s ritornello is clearly reminiscent of the initial dramatic bars of Mozart’s overture to his opera. In fact, Bennett seems to have exercised an obsession with D minor at this point in his education. His second symphony (WO23)—which also shows symptoms of Don Giovanni and which was composed at much the same time as the first concerto—uses the same key for its outer movements, as does an overture (WO24) composed in October 1833. It also seems more than a coincidence that Cipriani Potter’s first surviving piano concerto, completed only two months after Bennett’s work in December 1832 (and recorded on volume 72 of this series), should have been written in the same key. While the Don Giovanni idea dominates the first thirty bars of Bennett’s ritornello, the second phase is taken up with a presentation of the second subject in F major. This entirely Classical idea, with its regular periodic structure, is firmly rooted in the relative major and it is only with a repetition of the melody that Bennett redirects the tonality back to D minor in preparation for the entry of the piano. At this juncture there is an unexpected interjection of the Neapolitan. Mozart’s predilection for this chromatic inflection is well known, and Bennett’s dramatic use of the harmony was probably a respectful gesture, but it could also have been down to Potter’s influence: a similar Neapolitan flourish (albeit more cadenza-like) occurs at the same point in the first movement of his own concerto in D minor. The presentation of Bennett’s second subject also follows a traditional ‘London’ procedure in that, after the statement of the lyrical material, a secondary phase gives rise to an exhibition of virtuoso technique from the soloist. This strategic thinking—impressive for one so young—is continued in the recapitulation where the reprise of the first subject is taken entirely by the orchestra, thus throwing the restatement of the second subject in the tonic major into relief with the arrival of the piano.

The tripartite second movement, andante sostenuto, owes much to the simplicity and lyrical effusion of John Field’s slow movements, especially the chamber-music idiom of the more nocturne-like central section with its solo wind instruments. The anomaly of ending with a ternary scherzo suggests that Bennett originally planned an innovative four movements for his concerto but was persuaded to drop the finale. The Capriccio in D minor, Op 2, for solo piano, composed (according to his RAM student colleague George Macfarren) in early 1834 and dedicated to Potter, may well have been the original last movement.

In his Piano Concerto No 2 in E flat major, Op 4, composed between July and November 1833 and dedicated to Potter, there is a clearly a greater expression of new-found self-assurance. Bennett performed it three times at the RAM in 1834 alone and it was with this work that he made his soloist debut at the Philharmonic Society on 11 May 1835. Bennett also revived it in February 1838 for another London concert and other pianists such as Calkin and Dorrell gave performances in the capital in 1839 and 1842. The opening orchestral ritornello of the second concerto may still radiate the composer’s love of Mozart, but the sense of scale (125 bars) is clearly much more ambitious as is evident from the larger proportions of the sonata movement, the level of thematic invention (which embraces Bach as well as Mozart and Beethoven), and the much greater technical demands Bennett makes in the solo part. In the same manner as the first concerto, Bennett reserves the first subject of the recapitulation (a substantial passage of some thirty bars) for the orchestra alone, leaving the lyrical second subject and the immensely demanding bravura material that follows to the piano.

The adagio quasi espressivo is thematically tauter in its monothematic objectives, particularly in the way the central paragraph not only transforms the initial melody into a more severe contrapuntal ‘invention’ but also, by dint of its tonal instability, functions as a developmental phase. As if to intensify this entirely romantic sense of transformation, Bennett interrupts his dominant preparation for the reprise with a florid cadenza whose elaborations intermingle seamlessly with the orchestral tutti that follows. The handling of form in the finale (which brings Bennett more into the province of Mendelssohn’s ‘shared’ sonata structures) is playful and inventive. The prolonged introduction on the dominant is by no means unessential extemporization, but is made use of again after an unexpected caesura at the end of the first subject. Here the dominant pedal is raised a semitone to B natural, facilitating the entry of transitional material in C minor. The counterpart of this shift in the recapitulation, after a similar caesura, is a reinterpretation of B natural as C flat (as part of a German augmented sixth), thus instigating a return to the dominant of E flat.

If the second concerto established Bennett’s reputation as a pianist-composer, it was with his Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 9, dedicated to Cramer, that the eighteen-year-old composer (and still a student at the RAM) began to enjoy true public adulation, and this in the context of a vibrant London concert world where concertos by Mozart, Herz, Potter, Moscheles, Beethoven, Hummel, Benedict and even Macfarren (whose own C minor concerto was given by the Society of British Musicians on 2 November 1835) were enjoying degrees of success. After its premiere at the RAM on 16 May 1835 and the first hearing at the Philharmonic on 25 April 1836, Bennett made his debut in Leipzig with the concerto on 19 January 1837. Schumann’s review in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was not only a rebuke to the Gewandhaus audience, who were deeply sceptical about the new work, but also a paean to Bennett who had become a close friend:

‘An English composer; no composer’, said someone before the Gewandhaus concert of a few weeks ago, at which Mr Bennett played the above concerto. When it was over, I turned to him, questioning, ‘An English composer?’ ‘And truly an angelic one’, answered the Anglophobe … When we remember that the above concerto was written three years ago—that is to say, in its composer’s nineteenth year—we are astonished at the early dexterity of this artist-hand, the connection of the whole, its reposeful arrangement, its euphonious language, its purity of thought. Though perhaps I could have wished certain lengthened passages more concentrated in the first movement, yet that is individual. Nothing, on the whole, is out of place; there is nothing in the work that does not appear inwardly related to its fundamental plan; and even where new elements step in, the golden ground-threads still shine through, led as only a master-hand can lead them. How delightful it is to find an organic, living whole amid the trash of student-work; and how doubly delightful it was to find the Leipzig public, so little prepared for this, recognizing it quickly and joyfully!

After Leipzig Bennett continued to perform the work in London: for the Society of British Musicians (22 January 1838), twice for the Philharmonic in 1841 and 1844, and at least twice for benefit concerts in 1840 and 1854.

The orchestral ritornello of the more brooding third concerto is an impressive assimilation of Mozart and Bach. Indeed one senses a paraphrase of the opening idea of Mozart’s concerto K491 (in the same key) and something of the contrapuntal austerity of the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K546, itself an expression of Mozart’s admiration for Bach. Bennett demonstrates a new confidence in his handling of invertible counterpoint and in the symphonic adroitness with which the opening idea is reworked. As if to emphasize this greater fecundity, the exposition begins with twenty-four bars of cadenza-like improvisation for the pianist, an arresting departure accentuated by the piano’s entry on the submediant, a gesture which initiates a phase of austere two-part imitation before a further reiteration of the melody on a preparatory dominant pedal. This fertile level of creativity continues in a much more discursive development to which the composer responds with a truncated recapitulation of the first subject, again entirely given to the orchestra, allowing the lyrical second subject in the tonic major and the bravura material which follows to gain added weight. Moreover, the first subject is given one final hearing in a more clearly defined shared coda, markedly different from those of the first and second concertos which are provided by the orchestra. The romanza in G minor (probably the later of two attempts he wrote for the concerto) is a colourful, romantic essay and an advance on the ternary designs of the first two concertos. In his review of the concerto in Leipzig, Schumann perceived a fantastical, moonlit programme:

Then began the Romance in G minor—so simple that the notes can almost be counted in it. Even had I not learnt from the fountain head that the idea of a fair somnambulist had floated before our poet while composing, yet all that is touching in such a fancy affects the heart at this moment. The audience sat breathless as though fearing to awaken the dreamer on the lofty palace roof; and if sympathy at moments became almost painful, the loveliness of the vision soon transformed that feeling into a pure artistic enjoyment. And here he struck that wonderful chord where he imagines the wanderer, safe from danger, again resting on her couch, over which all the moon light streams.

An idea for pizzicato strings (presumably Schumann’s ‘somnambulist’ theme), framing a more distinctly Mendelssohnian theme for the piano, furnishes contrast to an adjoining poetic section in the tonic major. The climax of the movement, for full orchestra, occurs with a recurrence of the pizzicato material in the dominant, out of which emerges a more embellished reprise of the minor-major material, modified and condensed, though the most romantic imagery is reserved for a final reprise of the ‘somnambulist’ imagery and the nocturnal coda.

Out of this tranquil G major ending, the finale begins furiously with the piano alone before the orchestra (effectively a residue of a ritornello) takes up the same material. Such a device is again suggestive of Mendelssohn, whose first piano concerto had made a deep impression on Bennett. Referring to Mendelssohn’s first concerto in one of his 1870 Cambridge lectures, he wrote: ‘A young composer essaying to write a concerto without the traditional ‘tutti’ would have been almost cried down. And yet we have lived to see this strong tradition broken through.’ Of greatest importance to Bennett, in the light of this change, was the role of the orchestra which, in Mendelssohn’s atypical structure, was ‘always giving relief and imagination to the work’. This description fairly summarizes the resourceful manner in which Bennett’s invigorating finale is organized, notably in the development and recapitulation where the soloist and orchestra strive to shape an imaginative and equitable dialogue.