Pristine Classical Recorded Music

Friedrich Wührer

biographical notes from Wikipedia

 

Friedrich Wührer was an Austrian-German pianist. He was born June 29, 1900 in Vienna, Austria and died December 27, 1975 in Mannheim, Germany.

 

Life

Wührer studied piano with Franz Schmidt, conducting with Ferdinand Löwe, and music theory with Joseph Marx. Early in his performing career, which began in the 1920s, Wührer was a champion of modern music and a founder of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Vienna. He formed friendships with composers Hans Pfitzner and Max Reger, and he became associated with Arnold Schönberg and his circle, participating in noted performances of Schönberg's setting of 15 poems from Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, op. 15; his Pierrot Lunaire; and Webern's Pieces for Cello and Piano, op. 11. Wührer also performed music by Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Paul Hindemith, and on July 3, 1930 he performed Schönberg student Paul Pisk's Suite for Piano in the first broadcast of that composer's music by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In 1939, as Paul Wittgenstein, who commissioned the work, had fled Austria, Wührer performed in the premiere of Schmidt's Quintet for piano, violin, clarinet, viola, and cello in A major, albeit in his own arrangement for two hands rather than as originally written for piano, left hand alone.

Wührer continued his advocacy for modern works at least into middle age. For instance, he gave the premiere of Pfitzner's Sechs Studien für das Pianoforte, op. 51, shortly after its composition in 1943 and in the 1950s he performed the Piano Concerto, op. 21 written in 1939 by Kurt Hessenberg. Nonetheless, notwithstanding his pioneering work for music of the Second Viennese School and other moderns of his day, Wührer's principal focus as a performer, his posthumous reputation, and his recorded legacy came to rest on performances of music from the romantic era, particularly works in the German and Austrian traditions.

Later in life, Wührer was a juror at the Second Van Cliburn International Piano Competition of September 26-October 9, 1966, which awarded first prize to Radu Lupu, and a member of the piano jury at the 1968 Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition. Wührer's son, also named Friedrich, was a violinist and conductor who made classical records.

 

Pedagogy

Outside the concert hall, Wührer was a respected teacher first in Vienna, then Mannheim (Hochschule fuer Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim, 1934), then Kiel (1936), and finally at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musikin Munich. He also regularly taught master classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum. He was denied an academy teaching position in East Germany in 1952, however, on grounds that he had been a leading Nazi in Austria during World War II.

Wührer's students included composers Sorrel Hays, Helmut Bieler, and Richard Wilson; pianists Geoffrey Parsons, Frieda Valenzi, and Felicitas Karrer, who described him as having an unusually well-balanced left hand; and harpsichordist Hedwig Bilgram.

 

Publications

Among Wührer's editorial activities, he wrote Masterpieces of Piano Music (Wilhelmshaven, 1966), compiled a collection of works by old masters; and prepared editions of the Chopin Etudes, polonaises by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and the piano music of Franz Schmidt. Claiming to be respecting the composer's own wishes, he created two-hand redistributions of the left-hand works that Schmidt had written for Paul Wittgenstein, although Wittgenstein evidently voiced strong objections. Besides editing the Etudes, Wührer wrote 18 Studies on Chopin Etudes in Contrary Motion (1958) as a pedagogical work for equalising the facility of both hands. Wührer also composed and published cadenzas for Mozart's piano concerti in C Major, K. 467; C Minor, K. 491; and D Major, K. 537.

 

Recordings and Films

In 1935, Wührer performed piano solos for the Carmine Gallone film Wenn die Musik nicht wär, also known in Germany as Liszt Rhapsody and English-speaking countries as If It Were Not for Music.

Wührer made numerous commercial phonograph records. His discography includes only a handful of 78 RPM sides, but he recorded extensively during the early LP era, mostly for the American Vox label. Among those recordings was the first nominally complete cycle of Schubert's piano sonatas on records.It omitted a few fragmentary works, but it did offer Ernst Krenek's completion of the C Major sonata D. 840 (Reliquie), possibly otherwise represented on records only by Ray Lev's Concert Hall Society account of similar vintage. Although some of Wührer's commercial recordings, all or nearly all mono, lingered into the stereo LP era in poor-quality ersatz stereo remixes, very few have emerged on compact disc, and in particular Vox bypassed his pioneering Schubert sonata cycle in favor of one recorded a few years later in stereo by Walter Klien. A third party entity, however, appears to have issued compact disc editions of the set copied from LPs.

Wikipedia's Wührer page lists contain the bulk of Wührer's recordings. Unless specified otherwise, all 78 RPM discs were 10" sized, and all LPs were monaural 12" sized. The Vox Boxes were all 3-record sets. CD issues mostly derive from radio broadcasts; CD releases of material originally appearing on analogue discs are noted in the sections for their original formats, with the CD section listing only recordings not released in other formats.

 

 

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Wührer

 

 

Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 4

musical notes from Wikipedia

 

Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58, was composed in 1805–1806, although no autograph copy survives.

 

Musical forces and movements

The work 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. As is standard for classical concertos, it is in three movements:

I. Allegro moderato (G major)

II. Andante con moto (E minor)

III. Rondo (Vivace) (G major)

 

Premiere and reception

The Fourth Concerto was premiered by Beethoven himself at a private concert given in March, 1807 at the palace of his patron, Prince Lobkowitz. However, the public premiere was not until 22 December 1808 in Vienna at the Theater an der Wien. Beethoven again took the stage as soloist. This was part of a marathon concert which 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.

A review in the May 1809 edition of 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, considered one of the central works of the piano concerto literature.

 

Movements

 

I. Allegro moderato

The first movement opens with the solo piano, playing simple chords in the tonic key before coming to rest on a dominant chord. After a poetic pause of two and a half beats, the orchestra then enters in B major, the major mediant key, thus creating a tertiary chord change. This becomes a motif of the opening movement.

The orchestra states the main theme in B major, dropping through the circle of fifths to a cadence in the tonic, G major. The theme is then stated again, this time in stretto between upper and lower voices. A very strong cadence in the tonic, withering away within one bar, introduces a transitional, modulatory theme with restless triplet accompaniment, also containing hints of stretto. The music moves to the minor mediant key, B minor, while its dynamic is reduced to pianissimo, at which point material from the opening theme returns. Through a rising bass line and sequential harmonies, the music regains the tonic key (on a dominant pedal) with a new theme derived from bars 3, 4, and 5. The final cadence is delayed for several bars before the material from the opening bar resurfaces as the movement's closing theme, accompanied by a tonic pedal over forte dominant chords.

Felix Salzer, on page 195 of his book entitled Structural Hearing, says the following about this opening, "[It is] one of the most fascinating substitutions of the entire literature...The whole passage appears as a most imaginative prolongation of interruption, the post-interruption phrase starting with a B-Major chord boldly substituting for the tonic. In addition, this post-interruption phrase introduces a very interesting melodic parallelism in form of an augmentation of the end of the pre-interruption phrase one step higher." In other words, the piano plays the antecedent phrase of this period, and the orchestra answers with ^3 supported not as chordal third of the tonic G, but rather as a root of a #III (B major) chord which substitutes for the localized tonic G major chord. After a series of parallel tenths, (which contains the seeds of the secondary theme's parallel 10ths) ^3 is supported by tonic, which proceeds to ^2 supported by II6 and V7 before achieving the end of the period with a PAC. (WMH)

The piano's entrance resembles an Eingang, an improvisatory passage from Mozart's day that would have occurred after the orchestra's last unresolved dominant chord, but before the piano played the main theme. Beethoven captures this improvisatory style by accelerating the rhythm in the piano part, from eighths, to triplets, to sixteenths, and finally in a scale that rushes downward in sixteenth sextuplets. A long preparation is then made before a tonic cadence duly arrives, and the orchestra once again takes up the main theme.

 

II. Andante con moto

The second movement is widely associated with the imagery of Orpheus taming the Furies (represented, respectively, by the piano and unison strings) at the gates to Hades. It was long thought that Franz Liszt had been the first to suggest this association, although, as musicologist Owen Jander pointed out (Jander, 1985), it was probably first used by Adolph Bernard Marx in his 1859 biography of Beethoven. The movement's quiet E minor ending leads without pause into the C major chords that open the finale.

The solo cadenza at the end of the movement calls for a usage of the left pedal in a manner which is not literally possible on the modern piano; for discussion see Piano history and musical performance.

 

III. Rondo (Vivace)

In contrast to the preceding movements, the third movement, in traditional rondo form, is characterized by a very rhythmic theme. The main theme begins in the subdominant key of C major before correcting itself to reach a cadence in the tonic G major.

 

Cadenzas

Cadenzas for the Fourth Piano Concerto have been written a number of pianists and composers throughout its history; these include Clara Schumann, Feruccio Busoni, Hans von Bülow, Ignaz Moscheles, Camille Saint-Saens, Anton Rubinstein, Nikolai Medtner, Eugèn d'Albert, Leopold Godowsky, and Samuel Feinberg.

 

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_No._4_(Beethoven)