Julius Röntgen - Piano Concertos Nos. 3, 6 & 7 (Oliver Triendl)

Information

Composer: Julius Röntgen

• (01) Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor
• (05) Piano Concerto No. 6 in E minor
• (06) Piano Concerto No. 7 in C major

Oliver Triendl, piano
Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra
Hermann Bäumer, conductor

Date: 2019
Label: cpo
https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/art/julius-roentgen-klavierkonzerte-nr-1-3/hnum/3860286

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Review

The 24-year-old Julius Röntgen, in his four-movement Third Piano Concerto, stands very positively and pleasantly beholden to Johannes Brahms. Its Olympian milieu places it closer to Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto rather than his First. Another composer is recalled or foreshadowed in the regal huntsman finale: Saint-Saëns. There’s a lot less of the troubled storm or the passions in Rontgen. Instead we seem to hear a struggle to ascend to blessedly sunny uplands and then to wander among the highlands. The movements are short and will not try your patience.

It was into a violently uprooted Europe that the 65-year-old Röntgen ushered in his last two piano concertos. Each lasts not in excess of twenty minutes and the first of them is in a single movement while the second and last is in three. The Sixth Concerto was written for the composer’s friend Donald F Tovey and is affectingly melodious. Textures are clearer than in the Third and although not sounding like his friend Grieg, Röntgen mixes romantic sensibility with uncluttered clarity. The successor to the Sixth emulates the Third in the brevity of its movements and its smiling summer tempests. Come to think of it, there’s something of a parallel here with the magnificently “awkward” Piano Concerto by Dvořák. The work is topped off by a tripping and somewhat Bachian Romanze, very nicely rounded off.

This is the first recording of these three piano concertos and the event is fortunate to be in the hands of these musicians and CPO’s engineers. All this is from a label that has done great and numerous service to the once almost utterly forgotten works of this highly productive Dutch composer. Quite a few labels, including Champs Hill, Nimbus, Conra and Toccata, have all weighed in for Röntgen

This disc complements CPO’s earlier recording of Röntgen’s second and fourth concertos but with different musicians. That leaves only the First and Fifth concertos to come before the complete cycle has been presented.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

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Julius Röntgen (9 May 1855 – 13 September 1932) was a German-Dutch composer of classical music. Born a gifted child in Leipzig, Röntgen's first piano teacher was Carl Reinecke. He move to Amsterdam in 1877, and became a naturalized Dutch citizen in 1919. Röntgen's works include 25 symphonies, concertos (7 piano concertos, 3 violin concertos, 3 cello concertos, other concertos), as well as numerous chamber, piano and vocal works. He also completed Grieg's unfinished String Quartet No. 2. Röntgen also harmonized and arranged traditional Dutch melodies used as hymn tunes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_R%C3%B6ntgen

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Olivier Triendl (born 1970 in Mallersdorf, Bavaria) is a German pianist. He studied with Rainer Fuchs, Karl-Heinz Diehl, Eckart Besch, Gerhard Oppitz and Oleg Maisenberg, and is winner of several national and international competitions. As a soloist as well as a chamber musician, Triendl established himself in recent years as an extremely versatile artist, with about 100 CD recordings demonstrate his commitment to the unknown repertoire of the classical, romantic and contemporary music. In 2006 he founded the International Chamber Music Festival “Classix Kempten” in Kempten, Bavaria.
http://www.icmf.nl/en/musician/oliver-triendl/

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