Hiller: Piano Concertos

The Romantic Piano Concerto series continues to bring undiscovered works to the listening public, performed by the greatest piano virtuosos of today. The composer Hiller was admired by Schumann, who described him as the exemplar of ‘how to combine orchestra and piano in brilliant fashion’. One of the most imposing musical personalities of the nineteenth century, close friends with the likes of Rossini, Liszt, Berlioz and particularly Mendelssohn, Hiller was nevertheless largely forgotten less than twenty years after his death as musical fashion changed. The Second Concerto is a genuine forgotten masterpiece, and Hyperion has been looking for the right opportunity to record it for many years. The First and Third concertos are both first recordings, and indeed the Third was never published. A combination of the appealing and the unknown makes this a classic RPC disc. Howard Shelley is a veteran of the Romantic Piano Concerto series. He conducts the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra here from the piano.

CDA67655  75 minutes 49 seconds
‘[Second Concerto in F sharp minor] is one of the gems of the genre, the first to be written in that key and with many surprising features such as the soloist kicking off proceedings fiercely and with ...
‘One of the more successful of Hyperion's prodigal disinterments of Romantic Piano Concertos. We have learnt from Howard Shelley's previous contributions to the series to expect brilliant and stylish ...
‘Ferdinand Hiller is yet another of those gifted, yet unaccountably quite forgotten romantic composers only now coming to light … here is another splendid entry in Hyperion's seemingly inexhausti ...