|
Albert - Concert for cello and piano. You can download the PDF sheet music Albert - Concert for cello and piano on this page.
The music of the Albert's cello concerto is lucid and persuasive, the themes are given full rein with the central idea generating a wealth of related material, and mood and tempo are contrasted in formally self-contained subsections. D'Albert calculates his climaxes with precision, involving the solo cello and the orchestra equally. Yet nothing in his score seems self-indulgent or irrelevant, let alone an end in itself. The concerto is an unified whole, vivid and convincing, and shows d'Albert at his finest.
To download PDF, click the "Download PDF" button below the appropriate sheet music image.
To view the first page of Albert - Concert for cello and piano click the music sheet image.
|
|
Eugen D'Albert Cello concerto in C major, Op 20, written in 1899, opens with a surprise: instead of the soloist announcing the principal theme, it is the oboe which first steps forward to present it, over arpeggios from the cello, followed by the clarinet; only then does the cello itself pick up the melody, the arpeggios now in the orchestra. The woodwinds remain a prominent feature of the orchestration, offering the rhapsodizing cello its partners in dialogue or commentary over the expansive solo part. Veiled horns bring in a Molto tranquillo passage which leads, in a series of cello trills, to the central Andante con moto, in F sharp minor, launched by an arching melody in the strings which is then taken up by the yearning cello.
Eugen d'Albert's background was as colourful as his own life was to prove to be. His ancestors included the composer Domenico Alberti (c 1710-46), after whom the Alberti bass takes its name, and his paternal grandfather was an adjutant to Napoleon I. Eugen was born in Glasgow in 1864 and numbered his composer father, Arthur Sullivan and Ebenezer Prout among his early teachers. Like Dohnanyi, the young d'Albert attracted praise as a pianist, and in 1881, at the instigation of Hans Richter, he went to Vienna where he met Liszt, travelling to Weimar the next year to study with him; Liszt esteemed d'Albert to be one of his most significant pupils.
Although d'Albert the performer was catholic in his taste, with Debussy featuring in his wide repertoire, d'Albert the composer was, again like Dohnányi, a Brahmsian.
|
