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Album review: Pianist Eugen d'Albert turns out to have been a much better composer

By John Terauds on March 25, 2013

dalbertcdThanks to the Naxos record label’s desire to record everything possible, we have the opportunity to experience a very fine performance of a symphony by once-famous early-20th century pianist Eugen D’Albert. He made his living on stage, but wanted to be remembered as a composer — and this new album makes a very strong case.

D’Albert’s cause is nicely served by German conductor Jun Märkl, who has a wonderful way with music from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He leads the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra in an excellent studio recording that impressively displays the composer’s deft hand at careful thematic development wrapped in a keen sense of musical narrative.

D’Albert was born in Scotland in 1864 of mixed European parentage and showed great talent as a pianist, so he was sent off from London as a teenager to sit by the side of Franz Liszt in Weimar.

D’Albert, who soon had a thriving career as a concert pianist, loved Germany so much that he stayed in that part of Europe, eventually becoming a Swiss citizen.

The pianist madly wanted to write music — opera especially. Only one is still occasionally performed: Tiefland, from 1903. Its Symphonic Prologue opens this album, moving with remarkable ease over the course of 10 minutes from quiet pastoral evocations to the tragic emotional core of the story, which revolves around two men loving the same woman.

The four-movement, 50-minute Symphony — d’Albert’s one and only — dates from 1886, when the composer would have been 22. It is masterful and makes me wonder how and why he never wrote another one.

The writing is modelled after the conservative values of Johannes Brahms, with careful (and clever) development of themes. But there’s a quicksilver lyrical side to the music as well as a keen sense of the dramatic. Its exuberant, brassy ending that is pretty much guaranteed to leave a listener smiling, yet there are many much more subtle pleasures, too.

Having an orchestra and conductor so wonderfully committed to the music helps — a lot. You can check out the details here.

To give you an immediate idea of the composer’s style, here is a much less polished, much brisker performance of the opening movement by the Basel Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ronald Zollman:

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In looking for background information, I discovered that the Swiss-based Eugen d’Albert Society started up an international piano competition last year, putting the focus on d’Albert the performer.

Ironically, d’Albert’s playing would not have got him past the gatekeepers of any major piano competition today.

We call it the Golden Age of the piano, but the approach to public performances was very, very different 100-plus years ago.

D’Albert was able to record piles of piano rolls before he died (in Riga, Latvia) in 1932. Most of them sit in dusty attics, silently disintegrating.

Here’s why, with apologies to Ludwig van Beethoven (and his Piano Concerto No. 4) as well as d’Albert’s great qualities as a composer:

John Terauds

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