Eugen d'Albert (1864-1932)
Piano Concerto No.1 in B minor, Op. 2
Piano Concerto No.2 in E major, Op. 12
Overture: Esther, Op. 8
Born in Glasgow in 1864, of remoter Italian ancestry, the German
composer and pianist Eugen d'Albert was a significant figure among the virtuoso
pianists of the generation after Liszt. Today, however, his name and
compositions are largely forgotten. His father Charles d'Albert had studied the
piano under Kalkbrenner and became ballet - master at Covent Garden, compiling
an influential treatise, Ballroom Etiquette.
Their ancestors included Domenico Alberti, originator of the Alberti
bass, a figuration popular in classical keyboard writing, and the family had
distinguished military association; François Benoit d'Albert, the composer's
grandfather, a French cavalry officer, had died at Waterloo.
Seeking his fortune in England, Charles d'Albert settled in Newcastle
upon Tyne, working as a dancing-master, conductor and impresario. Following his
marriage in 1863 to Annie Rowell, the family moved to 9, Newton Terrace,
Glasgow, where Eugen was born on 10th April 1864. The boy had his musical
training from his father, displaying exceptional promise in childhood. In his
twelfth year he won a scholarship to the newly established National Training
School for Music, later the Royal College of Music, and the family moved to
London, taking lodgings in South Kensington. One of d'Albert's fellow-students,
W.G. Alcock, later recalled the young virtuoso's astonishing performance at the
entrance examination. 'I remember standing at the door watching a chubby boy
playing the >Concerto in A minorby
Hummel. At its conclusion Ernst Pauer (one of the adjudicators and an eminent
virtuoso) declared "You will study with me!", sensing future
possibilities. By the time he was fifteen, d'Albert's technical command and
sense of interpretation were far beyond his years'.
Wagner's London performances in 1877 had a marked influence. Much
diverted by this 'music of the future', d'Albert quickly absorbed the progressive
harmonic language of Wagner's music-dramas, later making use of similar
techniques in his own stage-works. Of some twenty operas by d'Albert, only his Tiefland. Opus 34, with a libretto by
Rudolph Lothar based on Angel Guimerá' s Tierra
Baixa (The Lowlands), first performed in Prague in 1903, continues
in modern repertory. Flauto solo, a
musical comedy, after Hans von Wolzogen, on the life of Frederick the Great,
first performed in Prague in 1905, also then considered a masterpiece, was only
one of d'Albert's major achievements that has not stood the test of time.
In his final year at the Royal College of Music d'Albert performed
Schumann's Piano Concerto before
the Prince and Princess of Wales, to whom he was later presented by Sullivan,
at the old St James' Hall in London, and was invited to visit Queen Victoria at
Osborne House, where he accompanied the Duke of Edinburgh, an accomplished
amateur violinist. D'Albert's most decisive meeting, however, was with the
great Hans Richter, under whose direction he performed his early Piano Concerto in A minor, described by
the correspondent of The Musical Times as
'uncompromising in its pretensions to rank with the chief of its kind', but
'redundant in matter'.
At Richter's invitation, d'Albert travelled to Vienna in December 1881,
quickly gaining introductions to the leading figures in the musical world
there, among them Hans von Bülow and Johannes Brahms, whose piano concertos he
performed under the composer's direction. D'Albert also met the influential critic
Eduard Hanslick, who was well disposed towards him; in d'Albert's string
quartets, inspired by Beethoven's, Hanslick would find 'the stamp of his
personality... the individual physiognomy'. Richter also engineered a meeting
between d'Albert and Franz Liszt, who, never particularly generous in praise of
fellow pianists, wrote warmly of 'an artist, an extraordinary pianist by the
name of d'Albert: Hans Richter, the eminent conductor, introduced him to me in
Vienna last April [1882]. Since then he has worked at Weimar under my
tutelage... I know of no more gifted or dazzling talent than his'.
Widely admired as an interpreter of Beethoven, Brahms and Liszt, Eugen
d'Albert also championed works by new composers, including Reger and Busoni. He
also won acclaim for his performances of Bach and Baroque models informed
several of his mature compositions, most notably his Piano Sonata, Opus 10,which ends with a monumental and
taxing triple fugue.
After the failure in 1905 of his marriage with the Venezuelan pianist
Teresa Carreno, Eugen d'Albert assumed the directorship of the Berlin
Musikhochschule, succeeding Joseph Joachim in that position. Although his
daughter alleged that d'Albert disliked teaching, several distinguished
musicians, including Wilhelm Backhaus and Ernst von Dohnânyi, claimed to have
been his students. Reliable information is scarce, but the period was certainly
one of the least remarkable and probably the unhappiest of d'Albert's career.
In 1914 he took Swiss citizenship, devoting himself increasingly thereafter to
composition. Although he lived well into the era of sound recording, surviving
recordings offer only tantalising glimpses of stunning virtuosity amid much
that seems mediocre and unremarkable. He died in Riga on 3rd March 1932.
D'Albert's Piano Concerto in A
minor, heard during Richter's London season on 1881, has not
survived. The Piano Concerto No.1 in B
minor, Opus 2, appeared three years later, with a dedication to
Franz Liszt, whose innovations of thematic metamorphosis and cyclic form
appealed powerfully to d'Albert. Early critics noted an understandable
predisposition towards virtuosity, but, while d'Albert intended the work as a
vehicle for his own bravura technique, the concerto displays remarkable
creative refinement. Cast in cyclic bi-partite form, the work revolves around a
poignantly reflective slow movement, a second episode, marked Langsam, mit Empfindung (Slow, with
feeling), framed by substantial episodes built around the concerto's elegiac
opening section. Both are developed fully, the solo part incorporating an
armoury of virtuoso devices in the Lisztian manner. An ingenious fugal cadenza
follows the repetition of the first episode, leading to a dazzling Scherzo in 6/8 time, in which the sombre
opening motif of the concerto is subject to a Lisztian metamorphosis, emerging
in brilliant primary colours. The work ends, fittingly, with spectacular and
emphatic brilliance.
Eugen d' Albert's Piano Concerto
No.2 in E major, Opus 12, is, by contrast, the work of a mature and
accompli shed composer, now able to achieve a judicious balance between form
and content, without compromising virtuoso interests. Written in 1893, the
concerto is contemporaneous with the earliest of d'Albert's operas, Der Rubin (The Ruby). That it met with
limited success suggests the composer's waning interest in a form to which he
never returned. Again in freely adapted cyclic form, the work is more concise
than its predecessor; three principal sections are again discernible within the
overall structure, with a scherzo episode, marked Sehr lebhaft (very lively), between the slow movement and
the finale. Whereas the first of the two concertos begins introspectively, in
the second a robust, declamatory mood is instantly proclaimed. The opening
section, marked Mäßig bewegt (moderato)
features an expansive heroic motif, rich in pianistic possibilities. The
development, with interjections from the solo cello and dialogues between
soloist and wind instruments of almost Straussian radiance, affords effective
contrast. The slow movement begins with a lengthy solo passage for the piano,
the principal idea being taken up by the strings. A brief section interpolated
before the finale, with its expected transformation of the first episode in
altered metre, crotchet to dotted crotchet, fulfils the rôle of a scherzo. The
mercurial piano figurations and delicate woodwind writing impart a mood of
puckish, Mendelssohnian lightness, in anticipation of the triumphant finale.
The concerto ends with the customary grandiloquence expected of virtuoso
concertos of the period.
D'Albert's overture to Grillparzer's Esther
was completed in 1888, testimony to the composer's skill as an
orchestrator. This elegantly descriptive work, a symphonic poem in all but
name, also betrays indebtedness to both Wagner and Liszt. Strong,
authoritatively sculpted themes and assured but never bombastic orchestration
reveal it as more than just the sum of combined influences. Like his piano
concertos, his superb Cello Concerto in C
major and many other neglected works, this fine overture suggests
that widespread re-appraisal of Eugen d'Albert's music is now long overdue.
Michael Jameson
D'Albert scores&
parts were lent by the Edwin A. Fleisher
Collection of Orchestral Music in The Free Library of Philadelphia.
Joseph Banowetz
Joseph Banowetz is internationally recognized as an artist whose
performances of the Romantic literature of the piano have earned the highest
critical acclaim. The American Fanfare
Record Magazine termed him one of "the pre-eminent 'three B's
of Liszt Playing." Born in the United States, part of Banowetz's early
training was received in New York City with Carl Friedberg, a pupil of Clara
Schumann. After continuing his studies at Vienna's Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende
Kunst, Banowetz's career was launched upon his graduating with a First Prize in
piano. He was then sent by the Austrian government on an extended European
concert tour. Subsequently he has performed throughout North America, Europe,
Russia, and Asia. In 1966 he was awarded the Pan American Prize by the
Organization of American States in Washington, o. C. Following his first
appearances in the Far East in 1981, Banowetz's tours there have received ever-
increasing enthusiastic response. He is the first foreign artist ever to be
invited by the Chinese Ministry of Culture both to record and to give world
première performances of a contemporary Chinese piano concerto (Huang An-lun's Piano Concerto, Op. 25b). Banowetz has recorded with both the Hong
Kong Philharmonic and the China Central Opera Orchestras of Beijing.
Dmitry Yablonsky
The cellist and conductor Dmitry Yablonsky emigrated to the United
States of America from the former Soviet Union in 1977, having already made his
orchestral début at the age of nine in Haydn's Cello
Concerto in C major. In America he studied at the Juilliard School
of Music and at the Curtis Institute and graduated at Yale University. His
subsequent career has brought concert appearances both in Russia and throughout
Western Europe and America, as a soloist with orchestras and conductors of
great distinction and in chamber music with musicians such as Yuri Bashmet,
Vadim Repin, Boris Berezovsky and with his mother, the pianist Oxana
Yablonskaya. Dmitry Yablonsky enjoys a parallel career as a conductor, having
studied first with Yuri Simonov. He has appeared with orchestras throughout
Europe in this capacity and is Principal Guest Conductor of the Moscow Symphony
Orchestra.