Symphonies and concertos were seldom published in England in the late eighteenth century, since, as one music publisher put it, they ‘would simply stay on the shelves’. Though we know that Clementi performed concertos at many London concerts during this period, not a single concerto of his was published during his lifetime. The single Clementi concerto we have survives in a Viennese copy in the hand of Johann Schenk, who was for a time a teacher of Beethoven. Clementi converted the concerto into a more saleable sonata, published in 1794 as Op 33 No 3 in C major. The sonata shows clear signs of its ancestry: there is a good bit of bravura passagework for both hands and one occasionally misses the harmonic support of the (absent) orchestra. And where certain orchestral interjections are written out for the piano, they tend to sound plain and four-square amidst their colourful soloistic surroundings.
from notes by Leon Plantinga © 2009
