Moritz Moszkowski - Piano Concerto in E, Op. 59 (1/3)

Piano Concerto in E, Op. 59 (1898)

Movement I: Moderato

This lively, brilliant Romantic piano concerto is certainly one of my favourites. It was composed in 1898 by the German Jewish pianist Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925). He dedicated it to the virtuoso pianist Josef Hofmann, who studied with Moszkowski in his youth. This work enjoyed considerable popularity in the decade following its premiere, but it soon fell into neglect, along with the rest of Moszkowski's oeuvre (where - unfortunately - much of it remains to this day). By the outbreak of the First World War, his wife and daughter had passed away and he became a sickly recluse, rejecting all new composition students on account of their "modern" preferences as followers of "artistic madmen like Scriabin, Schoenberg, Debussy, Satie." Having lost all his money in defunct German and Polish bonds, by 1922 Moszkowski was so poor and heavily in debt that his colleagues (including Wilhelm Backhaus, Percy Grainger and Ossip Gabrilowitsch) arranged a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall, raising $10 000 on his behalf. Sick and destitute, Moszkowski died in Paris in 1925.

The soloist in this recording is the late Israeli pianist David Bar-Illan, though he may be better known as a journalist and media spokesman. He was the Executive Editor of the Jerusalem Post and later the Director of Communications during Benjamin Netanyahu's first prime ministership. In that capacity he was the regular spokesman for the Israeli prime minister on foreign media programs (like Mark Regev today). His talent as a concert pianist, however, is evident from this recording. The conductor here is Jean-Jacques DeBois, who leads the Orchestre des Concerts Français.