E. Franck: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2

Album review

Concertos of greatest virtuosity by Eduard Franck. The composer and pianist Eduard Franck was from an art-loving Breslau banker’s family and revealed his musical gifts at an early age. Later Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy became his teacher and even performed together with him. His friendly acquaintance with Mendelssohn and kindred musical spirits like Robert Schumann and William Sterndale Bennett showed Eduard Franck the way.

However, he increasingly emerged from the shadow of his models, and today he is honored less as a follower and more as a mediator between the generations who in his time anticipated many a new development by great masters such as Brahms and Bruckner. Franck’s Piano Concerto in D minor, Op. 13, his first broadly dimensioned orchestral work, generates its appeal above with its imposing and stormy main themes and brilliantly virtuosic broken chords in the piano part. The Second Concerto recorded here was previously available only in a manuscript of the score and a piano reduction from 1879. The virtuosic interplay between the orchestra and the piano, as heard on the present recording premiere, in particular makes us sit up and take notice. © CPO