Reger: Piano Concerto, Op. 114 & Solo works

Album review

Back when Reger was writing his Piano Concerto, 1910, Debussy was working on La Mer and Stravinsky his Firebird. Vienna was becoming the crucible of the new dodecaphonism style. Reger kept his distance from all these tendencies, preferring to explore his own path, which, while sometimes difficult, was always marked by polyphony and counterpoint. His music's architecture was always made up of self-contained cells, like a kind of careful patchwork in which the various elements didn't always seem to relate to each other. Just listen (or re-listen, rather) carefully to the Concerto and you will get a taste of this juxtaposition of modernity with a desire to remain rooted in the past. Markus Becker (who recorded all of Reger's solo piano works over twenty years) rounds off the collection with the Épisodes, written in the same year as the Concerto, but in an almost-miniaturist style – which just goes to show that all of Reger's work isn't marked by gigantism as these pieces all clock in at three or four minutes each. In them, the composer returns to the path of his great inspirations: the later Brahms and Beethoven's final works including the Bagatelles. © SM/Qobuz