Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

Howard Shelley & Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra – Potter: Piano Concertos Nos 2 & 4 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:53 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records

Volume 72 of the Romantic Piano Concerto series comes to the rescue of yet another neglected figure with three first recordings courtesy of Howard Shelley and his Tasmanian forces. Composer, pianist, writer and educator (he was an early Principal of the Royal Academy of Music), London-born Cipriani Potter was encouraged by Beethoven and admired by Wagner.

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Howard Shelley & Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra – Czerny: Piano Concertos (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:06 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records

Active in every genre other than opera, Czerny is now remembered largely for the numerous piano studies he wrote as pedagogical aids. Which makes Howard Shelleys advocacy of the three virtuoso works for piano and orchestra recorded here, two of them for the first time, all the more welcome: this is music which cannot fail to appeal.

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Howard Shelley, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra – Godard: Piano Concertos (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:07 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records

In sharp contradistinction to the rest of the composers in this series, all of whom look like walruses, Benjamin Godard looks quite a lot like Johnny Depp in his daguerreotype. We should be marketing this directly to teenage girls.

Howard Shelley directs the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra from the piano in this latest volume of The Romantic Piano Concerto series. As ever, they perform unknown music with consummate style and deep understanding, making the best possible case for the works. We have reached Volume 63 and the works of French composer Benjamin Godard, a figure who is almost totally forgotten today. He is described by Jeremy Nicholas in his booklet note as ‘a composer who combines the sentimental melodic appeal of Massenet with the fecundity and technical facility of Saint-Saëns’.

Among Godard’s oeuvre, well over seventy opus numbers are devoted to works for solo piano, ranging from Les contes de Perrault, Op 6, to Valse No 15, Op 153. His Hommage à Chopin can be found on Hyperion CDA67803, performed by Jonathan Plowright. Much of the enormous amount of music he produced followed in the tradition of Mendelssohn and Schumann (his admiration for the latter inspired a string quartet arrangement of Kinderszenen in 1876). With the emergence of more innovative composers, Godard’s conservative idiom meant his reputation faded before his early death in Cannes on 10 January 1895. However, in the three works presented here his writing for the piano exceeds the technical range of his two idols, and is often reminiscent of the bravura demands found in the concertos of Liszt and Rubinstein.

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