KEY POINTS:
Listening to the music of Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849), one hears a composer who falls uncomfortably between the worlds of Beethoven and the later generation of Schumann, Liszt and Chopin.
His decorative piano music was savaged by Schumann's critical pen and, as recently as 1972, dismissed by musicologist Yonty Solomon as "so fashionable it did not survive its own time, let alone survive into ours".
Thanks to Hyperion's Romantic Piano Concerto series, two of Kalkbrenner's concertos have survived. The appearance of Howard Shelley and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra's new recording of the German composer's first and fourth concertos means we can make up our own minds on the matter.
While there are many pages echoing the style of Hummel and Weber, there are also a few Beethoven moments in the First Concerto's Allegro and a certain Jewish tang to the First Concerto's Rondo and the affecting Adagio from the Fourth.
Tuneful and tune-filled, if not always profound, these works are done proud by Shelley and his Australian colleagues. The solo lines are crisply delivered with immaculate tonal control in passage work - Kalkbrenner put great store on a carefully articulated and smooth playing style - and the orchestra finds equal delight in the score's stormy flourishes and what sometimes sound like sprightly polkas.
It is difficult not to be swept away into other worlds by Alexander Melnikov's new disc of piano works by Alexander Scriabin (1870-1915).
This is visionary music on so many levels, from miniature Mazurkas that sound as if Chopin was being channelled by a contemporary jazz pianist to a full-scale Fantasie of 1897 that precedes Schoenberg's music of the following decade.
The centrepiece is the extraordinary Black Mass Sonata of 1913 which occasioned one of my favourite pieces of musical purple prose. Eaglefield Hull, Scriabin's first biographer, went into raptures over its "Scriabinic dance of cosmic atoms, mounting with ever-increasing palpitation into a veritable molecular vertigo".
Melnikov catches it all, to the last atom, fluttering through every shudder and tremor of Scriabin's volatile music.
A spacious Harmonia Mundi recording provides the perfect setting for a collection that allows you to explore your inner esoterica.
* Kalkbrenner Piano Concertos (Hyperion CDA 67535, through Ode Records)
* Alexander Melnikov plays Scriabin (Harmonia Mundi HMN 911914, through Ode Records)
