Muzio Clementi: Piano Concerto in C Major, Pietro Spada (piano)

Muzio Clementi - Piano Concerto in C Major, Pietro Spada, piano, Philharmonia Orchestra Of London, Francesco D'Avalos, conductor 1. Allegro Con Spirito – 00:00 2. Adagio Cantabile, Con Grande Espressione – 09:30 3. Presto – 16:40 Muzio Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Saverio Clementi (23 January 1752 – 10 March 1832) was an Italian-born English composer, pianist, pedagogue, conductor, music publisher, editor, and piano manufacturer. The name of Muzio Clementi has long been linked with didactic pieces and other works thought, incorrectly, to have been designed as mere exercises — which may partly explain why his contribution to the history of music remains undervalued today. Encouraged to study music by his father, he was sponsored as a young composer by Sir Peter Beckford who took him to England to advance his studies. Later, he toured Europe numerous times from his long-standing base in London. It was on one of these occasions, in 1781, that he engaged in a piano competition with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Influenced by Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord school and Haydn's classical school and by the stile galante of Johann Christian Bach and Ignazio Cirri, Clementi developed a fluent and technical legato style, which he passed on to a generation of pianists, including John Field, Johann Baptist Cramer, Ignaz Moscheles, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Carl Czerny. He was a notable influence on Ludwig van Beethoven and Frederic Chopin. Clementi not only did add to the technical development of the piano repertoire, he also, together with his partners Collard & Collard, manufactured the best instruments of the age. In all, Clementi's catalogue contains over 100 works, among them sonatas, capriccios, toccatas, fugues and other works for piano, such as the 24 Waltzes and 12 Monferrinas (lively Italian folk dances), several pedagogical works, including the three-volume Gradus ad Parnassum, an oratorio whose music has been lost, and six symphonies, autographs of the last four of which have survived, although incomplete. As a composer of classical piano sonatas, Clementi was among the first to create keyboard works expressly for the capabilities of the piano. He was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, where the epitaph on his gravestone proclaims him "The Father of the pianoforte". The single extant piano concerto of Clementi is this C major Concerto, and it survives only in a copy in the hand of Johann Schenk, one of Beethoven’s teachers. Clementi converted it into a more saleable solo sonata, his Op 33 No 3 (not No 1 as Naxos’s booklet has it), which captures not only the ideal piano sound for these works but also and more importantly the spirit of the piece.