Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 4 & 5

Beethoven's Piano Concertos Nos. 4 & 5 were his last two Piano Concertos, and they are often performed regularly. In this recording, the Pianist is Wilhelm Kempff, the Orchestra is the Berlin Philharmonic and the Conductor is Ferdinand Leitner.

## Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4

Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, was composed in 1805–1806. Beethoven was the soloist in the public premiere as part of the concert on 22 December 1808 at Vienna's Theater an der Wien.

### Instrumentation

It is scored for solo piano and an orchestra consisting of a flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

### Premiere

It was premiered in March 1807 at a private concert of the home of Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz. The *Coriolan Overture* and the Fourth Symphony were premiered in that same concert. However, the public premiere was not until a concert on 22 December 1808 at Vienna's Theater an der Wien. Beethoven again took the stage as soloist. The marathon concert saw Beethoven's last appearance as a soloist with orchestra, as well as the premieres of the *Choral Fantasy* and the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Beethoven dedicated the concerto to his friend, student, and patron, the Archduke Rudolph.

### Reception

A review in the May 1809 edition of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung states that "[this concerto] is the most admirable, singular, artistic and complex Beethoven concerto ever". However, after its first performance, the piece was neglected until 1836, when it was revived by Felix Mendelssohn. Today, the work is widely performed and recorded, and is considered to be one of the central works of the piano concerto literature.

### Movements

The movements are named as follows:

1. Allegro moderato
2. Andante con moto
3. Rondo. Vivace

### Cadenzas

Cadenzas for the Fourth Piano Concerto have been written by a number of pianists and composers throughout its history; these include Beethoven himself (two separate sets of cadenzas), Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Ferruccio Busoni, Hans von Bülow, Ignaz Moscheles, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anton Rubinstein, Wilhelm Kempff, Nikolai Medtner, Eugen d'Albert, Leopold Godowsky, Wilhelm Backhaus, Samuil Feinberg, Manuel M. Ponce, and many more.

In this recording, the cadenzas were written by Wilhelm Kempff.

## Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor"

The Piano Concerto No. 5 in E♭ major, Op. 73, by Ludwig van Beethoven, popularly known as the Emperor Concerto, was his last completed piano concerto. It was written between 1809 and 1811 in Vienna, and was dedicated to Archduke Rudolf, Beethoven's patron and pupil. The first performance took place on 13 January 1811 at the Palace of Prince Joseph Lobkowitz in Vienna, with Archduke Rudolf as the soloist, followed by a public concert on 28 November 1811 at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig under conductor Johann Philipp Christian Schulz, the soloist being Friedrich Schneider. On 12 February 1812, Carl Czerny, another student of Beethoven's, gave the Vienna debut of this work. The epithet of Emperor for this concerto was not Beethoven's own but was coined by Johann Baptist Cramer, the English publisher of the concerto. Its duration is approximately forty minutes.

### Instrumentation

The concerto is scored for the following: solo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets in B♭ (clarinet I playing in A in movement 2), two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani in E♭ and B♭, and strings. In the second movement, 2nd flute, 2nd clarinet, trumpets, and timpani are tacet.

### Movements

The concerto is divided into three movements:

1. Allegro
2. Adagio un poco mosso - attacca:
3. Rondo. Allegro

## Program Note - A Poet at the Piano

Wilhelm Kempff, born 25 November 1895, in the same year as Hindemith and Orff, was the son of an organist from Jüterbog in Brandenburg, and lived to become the "longest serving" artist under contract to Deutsche Grammophon. He made his first record for the company in 1920 and followed it with many more, including Beethoven's works for piano - concertos, sonatas, chamber music - more than once. A "Romantic", who had studied with Heinrich Barth, a pupil of Hans von Bülow, he prized the wonders that could be done by the gramophone: "This medium enables us to reach people who would otherwise have scarcely any opportunities to listen to music." His imaginative, unheroic, sensitive, lucid interpretations of Beethoven were admired even more greatly in France, Italy and overseas than in Germany, for the predominance of intuitive empathy over muscular strength, of an almost improvisatory *élan* over dutiful reproduction of the notes, of delicate shades of soft playing over noisy dramatics. For Kempff, Beethoven's piano works were fantasies which had been worked out and committed to paper, monologues in the case of sonatas, dialogues with the orchestra in the case of concertos.

Creating fantasies at the keyboard was meat and drink to him, from the days when he improved variations and fugues as a child prodigy. As a young man he exercised his imagination in composing operas, symphonies, lieder, and incidental music for the theatre. The old man, who went on teaching at his home in Positano in southern Italy almost up to the day of his death on 23 May 1991, exhorted his pupils to trust their own imaginations, find their own paths, and on no account to imitate him. "Kempff's intellectual independence is striking. In almost every piece he discovers details, transitions, modulations that others have passed over. He is one of those pianists who passionately sustain their individuality and will not allow it to be suppressed, who will always venture their own expression - if necessary at the cost of technical perfection." Such was the verdict of Joachim Kaiser in his book on great pianists of the 20th century (1972); Kaiser praised Kempff as the kind of pianist who "created an atmosphere".

Beethoven was a virtuoso pianist and wrote his concertos for himself to play, as Wilhelm Kempff's self-confident performances acknowledge. The composer could still perform his Fourth, written in 1806, in 1808, but his worsening deafness forced him to entrust the première of the "Emperor", composed in 1809, to his pupil Carl Czerny. These were his last piano concertos, therefore; they are regarded as the culmination of the Classical concerto in their blend of free-ranging fantasy, virtuosity and symphonic design. The free structure is the dominant characteristic of the G major concerto: solos and tuttis intermingle, the melodic, lyrical material and the bravura, demonstrative technique merge in a unity from which a new, Romantic style of playing would emerge. The improvisatory momentum runs throughout this work, whereas in the E flat major concerto it is mainly confined to the three occasions on which the soloist makes the cadenza-like "run up" to the heroic main subject of the first movement. The slow movement runs into the finale without a break in both concertos: in the G major a worked-out formula in the orchestra confronts an insinuating piano melody, in the E flat major the transition takes the form of a noble *adagio cantabile*. Both works end with the traditional rondo.

The recordings were made in the Ufa Studio in Berlin in just two days in July 1961 - a sign that Kempff's spontaneity had the flexible partners it called for, who thought and breathed as one with him. The nimble reactions of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra were joined to the gifts of a conductor who was renowned as the ideal "accompanist" to singers and instrumental soloists, Ferdinand Leitner. Leitner was then general musical director of the Württemberg State Theatre, under the legendary general intendant Walter Erich Schaefer. Kempff's junior by 17 years, he had started his career as a pianist, then, after the war, in Stuttgart and later in Zurich, he nurtured the ensemble principle in opera with great success - notably in his work with Wieland Wagner - and almost anachronistic defiance.

*Karl Schumann*

*(Translation: Mary Whittall)*

## Review

In the most beautiful of all piano concertos it isn't the orchestra which introduces the main theme but the piano": Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) justified in this way his preference for Beethoven's lyrical Fourth Concerto in G major. During his long, troublefree career, he played both the Fourth and "Emperor" Concertos all over the world, from the capital of his homeland Prussia, the Berlin of the Kaisers, to Japan and South America, from Scandinavia to Baalbek. He used to improvise the two cadenzas in the G major Concerto, employing a musical imagination that had been schooled in composition, and he made no exception when he recorded the work in July 1961, at the age of 66. This poet of pianism was accompanied by an orchestra he knew well, the Berlin Philharmonic, under the distinguished German conductor Ferdinand Leitner (born 1912). Kempff's witty and sensitive approach reveals new subtleties in the heroic E flat major Concerto, the "Emperor", a performance recorded at the same time as the G major that has frequently been singled out for the highest praise. The Penguin Guide has called it "perhaps the most refreshing and imaginative of all. Strength there is in plenty and excitement, too. [Kempff's] range of tone-colour is extraordinarily wide, from the merest half-tone as though the fingers are barely brushing the keys to the crisp impact of a dry fortissimo."

## Links

For the playlist of the album, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-CSPG25638&list=OLAK5uy\_mMWT46bYm1IIkxRXkBawM18FSv9gxSt5E

For more details on the album, click here: https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/beethoven-piano-concertos-4-5-kempff-leitner-617

For the official Deutsche Grammophon website, click here: https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en

## Notes

* Art Direction - Hartmut Pfeiffer
* Composer - Ludwig van Beethoven
* Conductor - Ferdinand Leitner
* Cover - Ferdinand Schimon
* Engineer - Werner Wolf
* Executive-Producer - Elsa Schiller
* Liner Notes - Karl Schumann, Mary Whittall, Hélène Chen-Ménissier, Gabriele Cervone
* Orchestra - Berlin Philharmonic
* Photographer - Rudolf Betz
* Pianist - Wilhelm Kempff
* Producer - Otto Gerdes
* Sound - Stereo
* Recording date - July 1961
* Recording venue - Berlin, Ufa-Studio
* Total duration - 71'10