retrofitrecs

William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875) enjoyed the advantage of a musical family. His grandfather, John Bennett (1754-1837), was a lay vicar at King's, Trinity and St John's Colleges in Cambridge (when the lay clerks and organist served all three colleges), and his son Robert (1788-1819), William's father, entered the choir at King's as a chorister before becoming an articled pupil of the organist, John Clarke-Whitfield. Accepting a post at Sheffield Parish Church in 1811, Robert fathered three children among which was one son, William Sterndale, born in 1816 and named after a close friend who had provided words for some of his solo songs. After the premature deaths of his mother in 1818, and his father (who had married again) in 1819, William went to live with his grandparents in Cambridge where his grandfather was still active as a lay clerk. His musicality was soon recognized and, after joining the choir of King's in February 1824, William entered the Royal Academy of Music at the age of ten on the recommendation of the Provost of King's, George Thackeray, who considered him a prodigy. At first the young Bennett tried his hand at the violin, but he quickly turned to the piano on which he began to excel, and by 1828, when he was only twelve, he was already appearing as a soloist at the RAM in a piano concerto by Dussek. Studies in composition began with the RAM's first Principal, William Crotch, but though Crotch was undoubtedly a man of intellect with a catholicity of interests, his musical purview was severely circumscribed and seems to have exerted a stultifying influence on Bennett. Until 1831 his progress as a student composer had been limited, but after he transferred to the new Principal, Cipriani Potter, in 1832 Bennett's whole demeanour changed radically. By the end of 1832, buoyed up by his advanced piano technique and Potter's more contemporary view of the piano concerto, he embarked on the composition of his Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor, Op 1, a work which, for its formal self-assurance, the fluency of its style and scope, and the brilliance of its young executant, was to astonish all those who heard it. The work quickly received five performances: first in Cambridge (on 28 November 1832), at the Hanover Square Rooms in London (30 March 1833), twice in Windsor for Queen Adelaide (in April 1833), and again at the Hanover Square Rooms (26 June 1833) where we know that Mendelssohn, who was in the audience, was greatly taken by the talent of the young Englishman. The concerto's publication at the behest of the Academy Committee undoubtedly acted as a major spur towards Bennett's career as a virtuoso pianist-composer, even though he never again chose to play it in its entirety in public.

The model for Bennett's piano concertos has often been given as Mozart. In some ways this is not surprising. Bennett greatly admired Mozart; there are numerous stylistic elements of his music which point to Mozartian influence; and Bennett was himself a keen executant of Mozart's piano concertos which, during the 1830s, were performed more frequently than they had been in the years after their composer's death. Nevertheless, the paradigm for the opening movement of Bennett's first piano concerto was not Mozart but the prevailing tendency of the `London Piano School', many of whose most earnest exponents, such as Cramer, Moscheles and Potter, taught at the RAM. Smaller than the ritornello of Mozart's K466 in D minor, the opening orchestral introduction lasts only sixty-five bars, yet Bennett cleaved to the process of two distinct thematic ideas, with a third providing the coda material. The first idea, in D minor, is, as Geoffrey Bush has remarked, `the D minor of Don Giovanni', and the bold gesture of the I-Vb progression that opens Bennett's ritornello is clearly reminiscent of the initial dramatic bars of Mozart's overture to his opera. In fact, Bennett seems to have exercised an obsession with D minor at this point in his education. His second symphony (WO23)-which also shows symptoms of Don Giovanni and which was composed at much the same time as the first concerto-uses the same key for its outer movements, as does an overture (WO24) composed in October 1833. It also seems more than a coincidence that Cipriani Potter's first surviving piano concerto, completed only two months after Bennett's work in December 1832 (and recorded on volume 72 of this series), should have been written in the same key. While the Don Giovanni idea dominates the first thirty bars of Bennett's ritornello, the second phase is taken up with a presentation of the second subject in F major. This entirely Classical idea, with its regular periodic structure, is firmly rooted in the relative major and it is only with a repetition of the melody that Bennett redirects the tonality back to D minor in preparation for the entry of the piano. At this juncture there is an unexpected interjection of the Neapolitan. Mozart's predilection for this chromatic inflection is well known, and Bennett's dramatic use of the harmony was probably a respectful gesture, but it could also have been down to Potter's influence: a similar Neapolitan flourish (albeit more cadenza-like) occurs at the same point in the first movement of his own concerto in D minor. The presentation of Bennett's second subject also follows a traditional `London' procedure in that, after the statement of the lyrical material, a secondary phase gives rise to an exhibition of virtuoso technique from the soloist. This strategic thinking-impressive for one so young-is continued in the recapitulation where the reprise of the first subject is taken entirely by the orchestra, thus throwing the restatement of the second subject in the tonic major into relief with the arrival of the piano.

The tripartite second movement, andante sostenuto, owes much to the simplicity and lyrical effusion of John Field's slow movements, especially the chamber-music idiom of the more nocturne-like central section with its solo wind instruments. The anomaly of ending with a ternary scherzo suggests that Bennett originally planned an innovative four movements for his concerto but was persuaded to drop the finale. The Capriccio in D minor, Op 2, for solo piano, composed (according to his RAM student colleague George Macfarren) in early 1834 and dedicated to Potter, may well have been the original last movement.

In his Piano Concerto No 2 in E flat major, Op 4, composed between July and November 1833 and dedicated to Potter, there is a clearly a greater expression of new-found self-assurance. Bennett performed it three times at the RAM in 1834 alone and it was with this work that he made his soloist debut at the Philharmonic Society on 11 May 1835. Bennett also revived it in February 1838 for another London concert and other pianists such as Calkin and Dorrell gave performances in the capital in 1839 and 1842. The opening orchestral ritornello of the second concerto may still radiate the composer's love of Mozart, but the sense of scale (125 bars) is clearly much more ambitious as is evident from the larger proportions of the sonata movement, the level of thematic invention (which embraces Bach as well as Mozart and Beethoven), and the much greater technical demands Bennett makes in the solo part. In the same manner as the first concerto, Bennett reserves the first subject of the recapitulation (a substantial passage of some thirty bars) for the orchestra alone, leaving the lyrical second subject and the immensely demanding bravura material that follows to the piano.

The adagio quasi espressivo is thematically tauter in its monothematic objectives, particularly in the way the central paragraph not only transforms the initial melody into a more severe contrapuntal `invention' but also, by dint of its tonal instability, functions as a developmental phase. As if to intensify this entirely romantic sense of transformation, Bennett interru