The sinfonia concertante was a favourite form in the late eighteenth century, especially in France. Haydn and, more famously, Mozart both contributed to this tradition of multiple concertos. One of its late offshoots is the "Konzertant für Violin, Violoncelle und Pianoforte mit dem ganzen Orchester" (Beethoven's title) written in the first months of 1804 for the composet’s young piano pupil Archduke Rudolph and two string players in the Archduke’s entourage - the violinist Seidler and the cellist Anton Kraft, for whom Haydn had composed his D major cello concerto two decades earlier. As Beethoven stressed to his publishers Breitkopf und Härtel, the combination of piano trio and orchestra was a novel one, but the novelty failed to catch on. The Viennese public premiere (following a performance in Leipzig) in May 1808 was indifferently received because, according to Beethoven's factotum Anton Schindler, the (unnamed) soloists failed to take the concerto seriously enough, and there is no record that it was performed again in Beethoven’s lifetime,
The piano of 1804 was a very different instrument to the one we know today: the question of balance that modern performers must confront - that the keyboard may overshadow the deep-toned cello - would not have been an issue in Beethoven's time. (Pierre-Laurent Aimard's lightness of touch reserves this in the present recording.) The piano writing is light and limpid throughout, and the cello takes the star role - Kraft was, after all, a renowned virtuoso. In each of the three movements it takes the lead; and by writing consistently for its plangent top string, Beethoven enables it to compete on equal terms with the violin.
The orchestral introduction tn the tirst movement sets out the pregnant, mysteriotts npr-uint; tltctnc.
When the soloists enter (first cello, then violin, and finally piano - the usual pattern throughout the concerto) they immediately set to work, expanding and enriching the theme with touches of imitation and chromatic inflexions in the harmony. Later in an exposition that combines maximum terseness with maximum spaciousness, Beethoven establishes A (major and minor) rather than the expected dominant, G major, as the main secondary key. Here the swinging marchlike second subject acquires new shades of meaning through the brightness of the new key and the sweet, penetrating timbre of the two string soloists in their highest register. Beethoven builds an air of hushed, tense expectancy with a series of pianissimo scales and trills and then brings in the orchestra fortissimo in a surprise key (F rather than A major) - a dramatic ploy the composer was to exploit again two years later in his Violin Concerto.
The development is initially relaxed, slipping back to A major as the soloists each put their slant on the opening theme. But the music gradually grows more animated in a modulating dialogue for piano and strings against a four-note fragment of the main theme in the woodwind. There is a lull as the cello introduces the movement’s most haunting idea, a plaintive cantabile in C minor. Then, after another protracted passage of anticipation, the recapitulation brings back the once-mysterious main theme in a triumphant fortissimo - a favourite device of Bcethoven’s in his “heroic” middle period.
The slow movement’s remote key of A flat had been hinted at in the opening Allegro, even making a sudden dramatic appearance in the fortissimo outburst near the end. For mellow beauty of colouring few Beethoven movements surpass this rapt, meditative Largo, in which thc wind complement is reduced to clarinets, bassoons and horns and the orchestral violins are muted until near the end. The sonority of the cello playing softly at the top of its compass, so characteristic of the concerto, is magically exploited iu the noble opening solo and in the theme’s ornamented repetition for the two strings against harplike arpeggios from the piano.
As in the Violin Concerto and the last two piano conccrtos, the Largo does not so much end as dissolve into the Rondo, after a passage in which the soloists muse ever e long-held G major chord. The finale is a polonaise (a very fashionable form during the first half of the century), whose jaunty opening theme is immediately countered by a poetic modulation to E major. In this particulary interesting and beautiful example of the form, the typical “heel-stamp” rhythm, later fully developed, is initially hidden in the slurs that phrase the theme. And while several ofthe other ideas have a simplicity ideal for elaboration by the solo trio, there are two vividly characterised new themes in the A minor central episode. In the first of these, introduced for once by the violin, the dash and swagger of the polonaise are specially pronounced. As in the first movement, Beethoven dispenses with a cadenza. Instead he reinterprets the main theme as a boisterous duple-time moto perpetuo. But just as we seem to be sighting the home straight, yet another hushed series of trills leads to the return of the original polonaise rhythm and an almost exaggeratedly formal leave-taking.
Beethoven’s famous benefit concert in the Viennese Theater an der Wien on 22 December l808 was surely the greatest showcase of new works in musical history. In near-freezing conditions, connoisseurs and amateurs (“Kenner und Liebhaber“) heard the first public performances of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, three movements from the C major Mass, the concert aria Ah, perfido! and the premiere of the Fourth Piano Concerto, with the composer playing the solo part. As if this weren`t enough, Beethoven decided at the last minute to compose a brilliant and stirring finale to the evening, drawing together chorus, orchestra and himself as soloist. The upshot was the hastily written Choral Fantasy, a unique hybrid in Beethoven’s output which re-enacts the Fifth Symphony’s progression from C minor to C major and heralds in more naive vein the mighty finale of the Ninth Symphony. The concluding poem in praise of universal harmony and the triumph of light over darkness (echoes here of The Magic Flute) is probably the work of Christoph Kuffner, though Beethoven may have had a hand in it himself. As usual with the composer, the copyists’ ink was barely dry on the day of the concert. And with inadequate rehearsal time, the performance of the Fantasia was apparently chaotic, even falling apart at one point when Beethoven made a repeat that the players hadn't bargained for.
Like its scoring, the Fantasy’s form is unique. First comes a rhapsodic introduction for solo piano in C minor. In the 1808 premiere Beethoven improvised a different solo here, writing down this quasi-extemporised introduction when he prepared the work for publication the following year. After a climax of torrential bravura, the orchestra enters tentatively with a stealthy little march, answered quizzically by the keyboard. Then, with almost comical incongrnity, the piano announces a melody of childlike simplicity drawn from a song, Gegenliebe, that Beethoven had composed in 1794. As if in celebration of the powers of music, Beethoven varies the theme by exhibiting the different instruments in turn - flute, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, string quartet (in a dancing, gossamer texture) and finally the full orchestra.
The scale is now enlarged with three variations that expand and deconstruct the nursery tune. First comes a section in C minor, initially in ferociously pounding “Hungarian” style but later developing the theme in remote, shimmering modulations (shades here of the Fourth Piano Concerto). Beethoven follows this with a ravishing slow variation in A major (with the soft, Mozartian colouring of clarinets and bassoons) and a brash Alla marcia in F major that prcogures the tenor solo in the Ninth Symphony’s Ode to Joy. After another passage of poetic reverie and a cadenza-like flourish hom the piano, the conspiratorial little march re-enters. Vocal soloists then give out the Gegenliebe theme in its original simplicity against glittering keyboard figuration, leading to the triumphant entry of the chorus. From here onwards chorus, piano and orchestra sustain a jubilant blaze of C major, twice interrupted by a dramatic plunge to E flat to illuminate the word “Kraft” - power.
With the Rondo in B flat we go back fifteen years or so to Beethoven's early years in Vienna. All the evidence, including the scoring (flute, oboes, bassoons, horns and strings), suggests that it was the original finale of the B flat Piano Concerto, published as No.2 with a completely new final movement. After Beethoven’s death the score was lost; and the work was known only through an arrangement, with a nnore flamboyant, up-to-date keyboard style, by the composer’s pupil Carl Czerny. The original autograph turned up in the archives of a Viennese church in 188 and was eventually published in 1960.
Much of the rondo sounds like a slightly more decorous counterpart to the familiar replacement finale, likewise in buoyant 6/8 metre and featuring syncopations and offbeat accents. But in place of the central, “developing” episode, Beethoven inserts a gavotte-like E flat Andante in the form of a theme and two variations. This slow interlude has no parallel in any of Beethoven’s concertos. But his idol Mozart had done something very similar in the finales of two E flat Concertos (K 27l and K 482), one or both of which were almost certainly known to Beethoven.