Bennett & Bache: Piano Concertos

The Romantic Piano Concerto series returns to England, and explores further fascinating and little-known repertoire. Indeed, the concerto by Francis Edward Bache (1833–1858) has perhaps never been performed. The composer, a pupil of Sterndale Bennett, and acclaimed at a young age by contemporaries all over Europe as a prodigious talent of whom great things were expected, died of TB at the age of 25, leaving the manuscript of his Piano Concerto in the library of the Royal Academy of Music, where it has languished until this recording. This enchanting work is a great discovery. Also on the disc are two accomplished works by the composer-pianist Sterndale Bennett. The indefatigable Howard Shelley directs the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from the piano.

CDA67595  64 minutes 52 seconds
‘Hyperion's Romantic Piano Concerto series, a wealth of novelties and delights, has reached its 43rd issue … neither composer could wish for a more persuasive advocate than Howard Shelley, who, ...
‘Bennett's sparkling Fourth Piano Concerto, with its lightly worn debts to Mendelssohn and Schumann … the flights of lyrical fancy that make Bennett's piano-writing so engaging. As soloist and co ...
‘The Concerto (arguably the best of Bennett's extant concertos) has substantial strengths … it is wonderfully interpreted in this reading, which—with Howard Shelley conducting from the keyboard—h ...