Johann Nepomuk Hummel - Piano Concerto No. 2 in A minor, Op. 85 (1816)

Johann Nepomuk Hummel (14 November 1778 – 17 October 1837) was an Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era. Piano Concerto No.2 in A minor, Op. 85 (1816) 1. Allegro moderato 2. Larghetto (15:28) 3. Rondo - Allegro moderato (19:52) Stephen Hough and the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thomson His Piano Concerto No. 2 in A minor, Op. 85 was written in 1816 and published in Vienna in 1821. Unlike his earlier piano concerti, which closely followed the model of Mozart's, the A minor concerto, like the B minor Concerto, Op. 89, is written in a proto-Romantic style that anticipates the later stylistic developments of composers such as Frédéric Chopin and Felix Mendelssohn. Although Hummel's music, seen as essentially Mozartian in style, had fallen out of fashion by the 1830s, the A minor concerto nonetheless exercised considerable influence over a number of works that helped to usher in the Romantic style. Frédéric Chopin, who had played the Hummel concerti, drew from elements of the A minor concerto in his own piano concerti. Indeed, it has been suggested that Chopin's concerto is closely linked both thematically and structurally to the Hummel antecedent. The A minor concerto da camera of Charles-Valentin Alkan has also been noted for its debt to Hummel's style of writing for the keyboard. While generally uninterested in Hummel as a composer, Robert Schumann had made a close study of the A minor concerto in 1828 and considered it one of the works (along with the F-sharp minor piano sonata) of his "heyday". And in his own A minor concerto, Schumann makes reference to aspects of Hummel's virtuosic style.