Eberl: Piano Concertos op. 32 & op. 40

Fukuda, Riko, Giacometti, Paolo, Kölner Akademie, Willens, Michael Alexander

CPO 777 354-2

One may well say that Anton Eberl was Beethoven's leading rival in Vienna in the field of instrumental music. Born in Vienna in 1765, Eberl made early contact with Mozart. After many relatively unsuccessful attempts to gain a foothold as an opera composer in Vienna, he went to the St. Petersburg court of the czars for a few years. In 1799 he returned for good to Vienna and experienced a meteoric rise when he now turned to instrumental music. Already in a travel report penned in 1802, the author Julius Wilhelm Fischer ranked Eberl the composer next to Beethoven: »In piano compositions Beethoven and Anton Eberl are certainly now the strongest. Both have newness, fire, and power; both overflow with ideas, and the works by both are rather difficult to execute but then also certainly reward the effort.« In general, the Piano Concertos opp. 32 and 40 presented on a period pianoforte on this cpo recording follow the model of the solo. • Concerto developed toward the end of the eighteenth century – as realized exemplarily and individually in each case in Mozart's piano concertos. Eberl's concertos made an absolutely »splendid« impression on his contemporaries and continue to demonstrate his originality and compositional talent as well as the strict logic of his thematic work.

CD

14.01.2012

761203735426

ICMA 'Nominee' (2012)