Ferdinand Ries: Piano Concerto No.2 in E flat major, Op.42, Christopher Hinterhuber (piano)

Ferdinand Ries - Piano Concerto No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 42, Christopher Hinterhuber (piano), New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Uwe Grodd (conductor)
I.Allegro con brio – 00:00
II. Larghetto – 13:08
III. Rondo: Allegro non troppo – 18:05
“Ries's cycle of fourteen works for piano and orchestra stands as one of the finest musical achievements of the early decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike his teacher Beethoven, whose deafness drove him from the concert platform relatively early in his career, Ries remained one of Europe's most celebrated virtuosi until well into the 1830s. His receptiveness to new musical trends and his ability to develop and exploit them was as fundamental to his success as an artist as it was to his close contemporary Hummel. This quality of Ries is reflected in the formal diversity of his works for piano and orchestra. In addition to concertos, there are several sets of variations, two large-scale rondos and a polonaise.
Ries published nine concertos, the first for violin and the remaining eight works for the piano. The concertos were numbered sequentially in order of publication and as a consequence the numbering of the first six works is not only misleading, since the sequence of piano concertos starts with Concerto No. 2, but the individual publication dates bear little relation to the actual dates of composition.
Beethoven's influence is certainly there to be seen not only in the overall scale and structure of the works but also in their rugged, powerful orchestration. But in many other respects the works are dissimilar and intentionally so. Their musical organization is deft — there are numerous examples of clever motivic manipulation in the concertos — but it is also apparent that they are not thematically-driven in the manner of Beethoven's works.
Ries's harmonic vocabulary is not fundamentally different from Mozart's but the range of tonal relationships is greatly expanded. His music demands an expressive flexibility in performance that is almost as foreign to Beethoven as it is to Mozart. The rhapsodic quality of Ries's style is heightened further by the interpolation of cadenzas — some surprisingly extensive in scope — in the middle of movements rather than before the final tutu; cadenzas also serve on occasion to introduce movements rather than to function as a link between movements. That Ries experimented with this approach in his very earliest concerto illustrates his determination first to discover and then to assert his distinctive voice as a composer.
In the Op. 42 Concerto Ries succeeds in creating a more consistently distinctive style of musical expression in spite of the overwhelming impression that Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth Concertos must have made on him. What Ries had learned in the course of the previous few years was how to conform to structural and stylistic expectations on a fundamental level and yet do so in imaginative and even subversive ways. The work appeared in 1812 with a dedication to Archduke Rudolph of Austria, a fellow Beethoven pupil (albeit one rather more socially exalted than Ries himself) whom the composer had very likely met on occasion in Vienna. Ries probably composed the work with his lengthy European tour in mind and the interpolation of an Air russe in its finale may be an indication that he intended from the outset to perform the work in Russia.” (extract from album notes by Allan Badley)