 Né en Bohème en 1794, le pianiste et compositeur Ignasz Moscheles étudie le piano à Prague, la composition à Vienne puis entame une carrière de concertiste à Londres où il fréquente Mendelssohn, Chopin, Hummel, Liszt et un certain François-Joseph Fetis avec qui il coécrit en 1840 la fameuse Méthode pour le pianoforte. Il devient finalement directeur du conservatoire de Leipzig, ville où il décède en 1870. Ses Sonates pour piano composées entre 1814 et 1821 sont des œuvres de la période viennoise. Elles sont une synthèse entre la pratique de l'instrument et l'art de composer (Albertchsberger) tout en témoignant du goût Biedermeier de l'époque, un romantisme corseté et une grande élégance. Dans ces quatre Sonates, de caractères variés, Moscheles affectionne le chant, le cantabile si cher à l'opéra (Bellini) dans ses mélodies mais son substrat virtuose et aventureux émaille ses partitions de trouvailles d'écriture assorties de nombreuses difficultés techniques, ce qui lui valut d'être salué par Schumann comme « le meilleur compositeur de sonates de sa génération ». L'étonnante Sonate en un seul mouvement Op.49 Allegro con passione est une tempétueuse course à l'abîme malgré son titre de Sonate mélancolique. Le pianiste virtuose Michele Bolla spécialiste des instruments historiques joue, ou plutôt, transcende cette musique sur un pianoforte Mac Nulty d'après Conrad Graf (1819). Un disque bellissime ! (Jérôme Angouillant) Beethoven’s student, Mendelssohn’s teacher: new recordings of major works by a seminal figure of early musical Romanticism. By 1814, when the publisher Artaria commissioned him to prepare a piano reduction of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Ignaz Moscheles was one of Vienna’s most popular pianists, and his career as a virtuoso had begun. A decade later he settled in London, having put the finishing touches on the teenage Mendelssohn’s formal instruction in Berlin the previous year; the two remained friends until the younger man’s death in 1847. Moscheles’ composition has generally been viewed as a natural, not especially inspired adjunct to his considerable accomplishments as a performer and then teacher. However, Schumann considered Moscheles one of the best sonata composers of his generation, and this valuable new recording gives proofpositive of Schumann’s claim. They were all written within the relatively condensed span of around three years: the Op.22 Sonata dates from 1814, while the single-movement ‘Sonate mélancolique’ Op.49 in the pathos-laden key of F sharp minor was written the same year but only published in 1821. Also composed in Vienna in 1814, the three movements of the Op.27 Sonata caracteristique centre around a Viennese popular song, Freut euch des Lebens, later immortalised in a waltz by Johann Strauss (and then quoted by Mahler in his Ninth Symphony). Cast on the grandest scale in four movements, the Grande Sonate, Op.41 in E major, written in 1816, pays homage through its greater expressive and dramatic concentration to its dedicatee Beethoven. in Moscheles was capable of skilfully wrought musical structures, in which a Classical balance of thematic ideas is tempered with an early Romantic dynamism. Pathos in general, and chromaticism in particular, are not overplayed, and his music is never sentimental. The winner of several piano competitions in his native Italy, Michele Bolla specialises in music of the Classical and early-Romantic period, working on both historical and modern instruments.
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