Czerny - Systematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Piano | CPO 5553842

Czerny - Systematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Piano

£21.80

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Label: CPO

Cat No: 5553842

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 2

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 7th January 2022

Contents

About

Kolja Lessing dedicates himself to the multifaceted composer Carl Czerny and specifically to his Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte, op.200 (‘Systematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Pianoforte’).

‘If a finely written musical work can be compared to a noble architectural edifice in which symmetry must predominate, then a successful fantasy is a beautiful English garden, seemingly without rules but brimming with surprising variety and intelligibly, meaningfully, and planfully executed.’ It was with this poetic comparison that Czerny, writing in the introduction to his Anleitung zum Fantasieren, characterised the nature of improvisation, contrasting it with a composition elaborated in writing.

It is scarcely surprising that Czerny, quite early marked by many years of the closest contact with his mentor Beethoven and his unique art of improvisation, presented this compendium in 1829 in his effort to grasp music encyclopedically. As an instructive work, it systematises different kinds of improvisation and illustrates them with numerous models. In his compendium Czerny addressed the knowledgeable, technically uncommonly well-versed player. In his accompanying texts he refers to models that at the time were almost completely unknown such as Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue, to exemplary works by his contemporaries Beethoven, Clementi, Hummel, and Moscheles, and even to his own publications in respect of each improvisational genre.

Czerny’s op.200 offers fascinating insights into the musical practice of the early nineteenth century at the crossroads between Classicism and Romanticism – while he himself already belongs to the Romantic period by virtue of his encyclopedic thought bringing together all the epochs of music history.

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