
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 <b>...</b>
Moritz
Moszkowski
maurice
Piano
Concerto
in
major
Op.
59
1898
David
Bar-Illan
Israel
Israeli
pianist
Jean-Jacques
debois
Orchestre
des
Concerts
Français
second
first
movement
moderato
virtuoso
orchestral
orchestra
moszkowski concerto
moszkowski piano concerto
classical
music
musicanth