If you needed an unfamiliar Romantic piano concerto for a movie about a striving 
young pianist, you could hardly do better than the Dohnányi First, written for 
d'Albert when the precocious composer was barely out of his teens. From its 
portentous opening (with a nod to Meistersinger), through the heartfelt 
Brahmsianisms of its central Andante (the B♭ Major Concerto is nearly quoted), 
on to its chorale-drenched finale, it filches shamelessly from its late Romantic 
sources (note, for instance, the Brucknerian opening of the second movement, its 
lyrical horn sighing over a pizzicato accompaniment). But it does so with such 
unerring skill that it seems not an imitation, but rather a distillation of a 
tradition. For all its length (43 minutes in this performance, the shortest of 
the three I'm familiar with), it's a well-wrought work, as ingenious in its 
thematic economy as it is inviting in its melodic opulence. And while it may not 
provide quite as much opportunity for virtuoso dazzle as, say, the Liszt or 
Rachmaninoff staples, it would still make a welcome alternative to the standard 
showpieces on our concert programs.

Howard Shelley's modernist Rachmaninoff performances stressed lucidity over 
luxury, but he takes a different approach here, privileging the music's 
large-scale grandeur over the details of its gestures, its juicy harmonies over 
its rhythms, its oil-paint colors over the fine points of its textures. Thus, 
he's more intent on summoning up the massive power of the huge third movement 
cadenza (complete with angry timpani outbursts and interruptions by brass 
chorales), the nervous edge in the Lisztian recitatives of the first movement, 
just as he's more in tune with the soulful second movement than with the jaunty 
music that breaks into the ending of the finale, which is too thickly 
upholstered. Not a complete picture, then, but in its sheer authority, it 
supersedes László Baranyay's performance on Hungaroton, and, to my ears, it wins 
out as well over Martin Roscoe's somewhat more stringent, but less heroic, 
reading on Hyperion (CDA 66684).

On its own terms, though, Roscoe's interpretation is excellent, and some 
listeners may prefer Hyperion's decision to couple it with the Second Concerto. 
Chandos-apparently planning to include the Second in a later installment in 
their Dohnányi series-gives us instead the rarely-heard orchestral version of 
Dohnányi 's popular Ruralia hungarica. Granted, the faster music doesn't make 
the transition from the piano originals without mishap, as orchestral bulk trips 
up the more intricate rhythms. But the first movement (which moves from 
Brahmsian melancholy to nearly Straussian climaxes) and the fourth (which 
suggests that Dohnányi had been paying attention to the less flashy passages in 
Pines of Rome) are scored with such luxuriance that there's little reason to 
complain-especially given Bamert's unapologetically high-calorie 
interpretation. Nor have Chandos's engineers let us down. All in all, an 
impressive addition to a distinguished series.

  --Peter Rabinowitz