# Favourite cadenzas



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I'm interested in people's favourite cadenzas. It's sometimes hard to separate the cadenza from the concerto as a whole (I find this particularly with Schumann's _Cello Concer_to) and other concertos are like a series of linked cadenzas (Dutilleux's _Cello & Violin _Concertos).

Anyhow, my favourites from the music I've heard so far, are:

*Schoenberg*: Violin Concerto - there is a cadenza at the end of each of the three movements. To me, it appears that with each one, the soloist is losing his/her 'control' of the piece, vis a vis the orchestra. The last one in particular is very disjointed and the orchestra easily gains the upper hand.

*Brahms*: Violin Concerto - Joachim's cadenzas - they fit perfectly into the piece, integrate with it very well. Like the best traditional cadenzas, they look back & reflect on the main themes of the movement.

*Ginastera*: Piano Concertos 1 & 2 - I think both (or at least one?) of these begins with a cadenza. It's interesting when the composer decides to go against tradition, and begins with a cadenza. Saint-Saens does this in his _Piano Concerto No. 2_, but this is a less integrated work than say the Ginastera, imo.

*Henze*: Violin Concerto No. 1 - like Dutilleux, here there are a series of linked cadenzas throughout the whole piece. They speak to me of desolation, anguish and loneliness.

*Myaskovsky*: Cello Concerto - There is a brilliant cadenza at the end of the second (final) movement. This cadenza is the most 'modernistic' aspect of the whole work, the rest of the concerto is composed in an idiom that is not much more 'advanced' than that of Glazunov. In this case, the cadenza is the highlight of the whole work, it makes listening to the work worthwhile, imo.

*Haydn*: Cello Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 - The cadenzas written & played by Lynn Harrell are just brilliant & humorous. In one of them, he actually quotes a part of Schubert's _Symphony No. 9 'The Great_.' This is far from 'authentic' but people must be kidding themselves if they think that anything is, after 250 years(?).

So, what are your favourite & most memorable cadenzas?


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

Rachmaninoff 3rd piano concerto - no competition =O 

I guess so.

3rd PC by Ludwig Van also has nice cadenza. 

I could just post my favourite piano concertos, most of them have lovely cadenzas + I'm not so much of a violin freak (or any other concerting instrument freak) to get really stunned by cadenzas in concertos with other solo instruments.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Andre said:


> *Haydn*: Cello Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 - The cadenzas written & played by Lynn Harrell are just brilliant & humorous. In one of them, he actually quotes a part of Schubert's _Symphony No. 9 'The Great_.' *This is far from 'authentic' but people must be kidding themselves if they think that anything is, after 250 years(?).*


Not quite. My favourite cadenzas are precisely the opposite of the bolded text of yours. I have a set of Mozart piano concertos played by The Academy of Ancient Music (directed by Christopher Hogwood) with soloist *Robert Levin *(fortepiano, and harpsichord on the early concertos). Levin, a composer, musicologist, professor of music, professor of humanities at Harvard, deliberately set out to *improvise* the cadenzas in the style of Mozart. Now even though obviously nobody could pretend to be Mozart in any sense, Levin wanted to create in spirit the performance and in particular, the art of improvisation that was the norm during the Classical period, which sadly is often lost today (as modern performers only strive for perfect reproductions of written scores). He improvised all the cadenzas, which differed between each rehearsals (not recorded), and I have seen him in a live concert once with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (also directed by Hogwood). During the concert, when the orchestra stopped for the candeza, all the players of the ACO turned and gazed at Levin because the cadenza improvised was a unique one-off, in the true spirit of 18th century music making.

So, we're not kidding ourselves, neither was the Australian Chamber Orchestra at that concert I was referring to (Richard Tognetti was there too).

Please take a few moments to read the following. Quoted from The Academy Ancient Music website written by Levin on Mozart & improvisation.

*Quote:-*
Classical musicians have become highly specialised. Most of today's performers practise many hours a day painstakingly learning and perfecting texts written by others. Highly skilled at reproducing music, they often have little or no training in inventing it. An actor confronted by a missed entrance or a forgotten line can often rescue the situation by inventing dialogue to bridge the gap. A memory lapse, a sudden contradiction of pronunciation or dialect will shatter the illusion of identity between personage and actor and remind us painfully that what we are seeing is an artificial enactment of reality, not the theatrical alchemy that momentarily seems more intense than the life it imitates. While it is difficult to ad lib dialogue in iambic pentameter, every actor has daily experience improvising conversations in his/her native tongue. This is not so for musicians; and the task of inventing within the individual languages of the great composers is daunting if not impossible for a performer who has not had extensive training in composition and the grammar, syntax, rhetoric and texture of music (theory).

*In the 18th century all composers were performers and virtually all performers composed. Furthermore, virtually all the music performed was new. Today's gap in popular and art music did not exist then: each involved spontaneity within a language idiomatic to the time.* (Bolded by HarpsichordConcerto).

Improvisation is a given in non-art music. Present in music of all cultures, it is the central challenge in jazz. The genius of Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Miles Davis and John Coltrane (an arbitrary sampling of past masters) has been captured on discs that document untrammelled flights of fanciful imagination.

Mozart's performances were designed to display his talents as improviser, pianist and composer (that is the order his contemporaries assigned to his gifts). His piano concertos contain contrived chasms - pauses he bridged with impulsive audacity - the so-called cadenzas and lead-ins. Further, Mozart left many passages in sketched or schematic form, relying on the whims of live performance to fill in the specific expressive content anew at each performance.









The autograph score of Mozart's Piano Concerto No.21, 1st movement. The final chord of this page was one of the 'contrived chasms' - a chord over which Mozart would improvise.

In the 20th century musicians have been trained to try piously to observe the written testament of the composer. If the will of the performer emerges, it is often through flamboyant disregard of those instructions in order to use the composition as a mere vehicle for self-aggrandising display. Every performer and listener of classical music has experienced the standard repertoire hundreds, even thousands of times more often than the composers who wrote these works, making it ever harder to bring to them the daring of the work's initial effect. The standardisation of many of today's performances reflects all these trends.

Improvisation in Mozart's case requires an intensive character study of the entire work from within, for a spontaneous elaboration of the written text cannot be pasted on to the musical surface. The embellishments and improvised portions must heighten the portrayal of the work's persona, not a mere series of commonplace, banal conventions (a trill here, a curlicue there). We possess a significant number of embellished versions of Mozart from him and his circle, showing unmistakably the type and amount of ornamentation he expected. In light of this evidence it must be said that many of today's performances contain passages executed in a manner Mozart would have considered unacceptably incomplete. It will not matter how poetic, how sonically ravishing, the performance is if the utterance is not the expected 'To be, or not to be: that is the question' but rather '...be...not...question.'

Apart from organists, few classical performers improvise any more, even though the training that would enable them to do so is available. Today's performers, shaped in the crucible of competitions and recordings, learn early to avoid risk as a threat to consistency and accuracy. There is nothing more risky than improvisation, but there is nothing more devastating to music's dramatic and emotional message than avoidance of risk. This is not to say, however, that any kind of improvisation is better than none. It is fascinating to hear an improvised performance, but surely it matters whether the utterance is idiomatic to the language of the piece. How strange that movie makers spend millions shooting on historically accurate locations with period appurtenances and costumes, with dialogue from the language of the period, but often are content to use music that betrays the venue at every turn. A performance of a Christopher Marlowe play in which suddenly the dialect and pronunciation of rural Alabama were interpolated for several exchanges would be perceived by an audience as grotesque or comical, yet we permit such linguistic incongruities without hesitation in music. If Mozart's language is as worthy of respect as Marlowe's, surely it is worth the time to learn it from the inside in order to invent it afresh as part of each performance.

That is the goal of every Mozart performance I give, and of the recordings in the concerto cycle with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music in particular.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

- Peter Breiner and the conductor Trhlik once recorded the Mozart 20th piano cto with jazzified cadenzas only. Surprisingly, the playing is very good throughout the concerto and the overall effect of the recording quite remarkable, though more in a Beethovenian _fighting spirit _with fast tempi than the somewhat more restrained approach by most performers; recommended, though some of the more subtle nuances of Mozart piano playing are perhaps too absent. At least the finale is available on youtube.






I don´t know if the same characteristics apply to his later recording of the work with himself as conductor. Unfortunately, the Trhlik is coupled with a totally uinspired Chopin 2nd Cto by other performers.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Yes *Aramis*, I forgot to mention Beethoven. I went to a concert here in Sydney (the Australian Chamber Orchestra with Dejan Lazic, piano) where they played Beethoven's _Piano Concerto No. 4_. I loved Beethoven's own cadenza in this work, as played by Rudolf Serkin. But in the concert, Lazic played his own cadenzas, which sounded more like Brahms than Beethoven to me. It was too "beefed up" or heavy, it didn't have that concerto's lightness of touch. They seemed to interrupt the "flow" of the work. I don't have a problem with contemporary musicians playing their own cadenzas, but at least they should write one that "fits in" with the whole idiom of the piece. I can't comment on the Rachmaninov you mention, as I haven't heard it for many years.

*joen_cph*: I have heard a recording of Haydn's Cello Concertos on Naxos, played by Ludovit Kanta, with Peter Breiner's cadenzas. Yes, they were jazzy & bluesy, reminded me strongly of something coming from the deep south of the USA. Funnily enough, these fitted in with the whole piece (somehow wierdly?). But we have to remember that Haydn didn't write cadenzas for these concertos (not to my knowledge), so anything is up for grabs, it's fair game. If someone wants to write one that's more jazzy or folksy or whatever, then go ahead, I say. They're not replacing anything "original" done by the composer.

*Harpsichord Concerto*: that comment of mine about "authenticity" was really only meant to stir the pot & make people think. Unfortunately, I missed that concert you speak of with Robert Levin & the ACO. I think it's fine if people want to carry on the improvisatory tradition, so to speak, of the C18th. I was just trying to say that this approach had been pretty much "dead" for most of the past 250 years, any attempts to revive it now I see as a "new" approach to making music (perhaps a C20th/21st resurrection of the past). The whole period instruments movement is really as much a "new" approach to making music as an "old" one. It combines both the little we know of the past, with approaches that have happened since those times. I heard a recording of an interview with the late Stuart Challender (highly regarded Australian conductor, for those who don't know), & he said exactly this.


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## JAKE WYB (May 28, 2009)

Never fail to be amazed at *Prokofiev Piano Conerto 2* in the 1st movement - must be absolutely terrifying but the pianistic power is a spectacle


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## Edward Elgar (Mar 22, 2006)

I love Beethoven's cadenza for *Mozart's Piano Concerto 20*.
The *Schumann Piano Concerto* cadenza is excellent also, quite simple, but lots of soul.

One of the best has to be *Rach 3*. Rachmaninov wrote two cadenzas. One contained a scherzo and was the only one that Rachmaninov would play in public. The other contained a ridiculously difficult march that even Rachmaninov wouldn't dare perform. I love the Ashkenazy recoding where he plays the difficult cadenza. My god it's good!


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## Sebastien Melmoth (Apr 14, 2010)

Glenn *Gould* wrote two highly original and very interesting cadenzas for *Beethoven's First* Piano Concerto.

Wolfgang *Schneiderhan* re-worked *Beethoven's* appallingly bad piano version of his own *Violin Concerto* back into cadenzas for the violin version, which are very interesting and have some appeal despite Fritz Kreisler's cadenzas which are usually heard.

Don't Hillary Hahn and Viktoria Mullova do some original cadenza work in their readings of Beethoven's VC?


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Talking about Beethoven´s Violin Concerto, Kremer has also recorded the concerto with Schnittke´s avantgarde-cadenzas. The conductor is Marriner.











My personal opinion is that it is a welcome refreshment in a work that is too repetitive.

The Russian-born pianist Mark Hambourg made a lot of recording in the early 20th century that are eccentric by today´s standards. The Beethoven 3rd Concerto, recorded in 1929 with Sargent and sometimes available, for instance on the Piano Library Series, uses the rarely heard Moscheles cadenzas, and the pianist is unsual in the unpredictable changes of tempo in the movements and his phrasing in general.


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## jhar26 (Jul 6, 2008)

The (very long) one from the first movement of Prokofiev's second piano concerto is impressive.


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## maestro267 (Jul 25, 2009)

Prokofiev - Second Piano Concerto (I)

Elgar - Violin Concerto (III)

Tchaikovsky PC2 (I) and Concert Fantasy (I)

Messiaen - Des canyons aux etoiles... (IX; the entire movement is a cadenza)


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## Ravellian (Aug 17, 2009)

I heard the Cello Concerto No. 1 by Shostakovich and the cadenza was VERY impressive.. there's a whole movement devoted to it IIRC.


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## DeusEx (May 2, 2010)

Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven Violin Concerto (Kriesler's) cadenzas.


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## teccomin (Mar 21, 2008)

Prokofiev Piano Concerto #2 Mvmt 1. for its sheer bombasticity:


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## symphofun (May 11, 2010)

Peter Breiner here. Glad you guys liked the Mozart and Haydn. Just a little detail: due to Naxos error conductor Trhlik was credited as a conductor on this recording, whereas the truth is I played & conducted at the same time...and also, it is a live recording.

Best regards

PB


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## Sebastien Melmoth (Apr 14, 2010)

True story:

At the Manhattan cocktail party following their infamous concert performance of Brahms' First PC, an enthusiastic Lenny Bernstein effusively told an embarrassed Glenn Gould, 'You played that first movement cadenza so beautifully I nearly çame in my pants!'

Thereafter Gould never attended cocktail parties.


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## GraemeG (Jun 30, 2009)

Grieg's barnstorming effort in his piano concerto is amazingly effective.

I doubt anyone has written a better cadenza than Kreisler's effort for Beethoven. That is a masterpiece.
cheers,
G


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