The Romantic Piano Concerto · Vol. 16 · Huss & Schelling

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The Romantic Piano Concerto · Vol. 16 · Huss & Schelling

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The Romantic Piano Concerto · Vol. 16 · Huss & Schelling
FLAC | Booklet | 265 MB | 1997

Two virtually unknown American late-romantics make a surprising contribution to Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concertos series. Henry Holden Huss (pronounced ‘Hoos’) was of German extraction and so went back there, like Chadwick and Parker, to study composition with Rheinberger. He also studied the piano but, according to Tchaikovsky, had technical shortcomings: a critic advised him not to play his own music. Huss died at the age of 91 in 1953 and, like Schelling, was barely known on record – just a setting of Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar and a single prelude for piano. He looks like a one-work composer and this Concerto, in the unusual key of B major, is getting its first real chance exactly a century after he wrote it. At first it sounds like a predictable assembly of all the gestural paraphernalia of the romantic idiom with some pleasant orchestral textures. But, after further hearings, Huss gradually convinces with his own dialect of this inherited language, although reminiscences of other composers can be irritating; for example, a subsidiary theme from Chopin’s Fourth Ballade in the second movement at 3'13'' and later, and a certain hovering on the edge of Wagner’s Liebestod. But Huss does forge a continuity which, although not original, is convincing – especially in a committed performance like this. Hobson, who had to score a small missing passage, makes no grand claims in the CD booklet, preferring to let the music speak for itself.

Ernest Henry Schelling had a piano piece recorded by Paderewski (HMV, 4/28), who was one of his teachers, and a symphonic poem, A Victory Ball (after Alfred Noyes), by the NYPO under Mengelberg in 1926 (HMV, 2/27 – both nla). Otherwise the recording of his Suite Fantastique from 1905 must be his finest hour. Unlike the Huss, it was particularly successful in Europe. Schelling, a child prodigy who went to study in Paris at the age of six, gave the first performance of the Suite with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Mengelberg and it was regularly played by Moiseiwitsch, including a Prom under Wood in 1914. The work has a certain superficial charm with some neat touches. The central section of the very Russian scherzo is in five-time (1'24'') and the last movement, written when Schelling was homesick for the US, combines popular songs – in the manner of Gottschalk rather than Ives.

What makes the release unexpectedly compelling listening is the real dedication brought to these performances by Hobson and the BBC Scottish SO under Brabbins.' Reviewed: Awards 1997, Peter Dickinson. Gramophone