Issued by the Frederic Chopin Institute in Warsaw and taken from performances at festivals there in 2009 and 2010 that went under the banner of Chopin and his Europe, this seems a slightly odd disc. That’s not because of the two concertos themselves: both the 1889 work by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist who would later become his country’s prime minister, and the B minor concerto by Respighi’s teacher Giuseppe Martucci, finished four years earlier, are thoroughly respectable examples of the 19th-century romantic piano concerto.
But neither is particularly indebted to Chopin, whose influence only emerges in the slow movements. Tchaikovsky, with an added dash of Brahms in Martucci’s case, seem to have been much more important in the background of both works. The performances are average to say the least, and the works’ rarity aside, there seems little to justify their commercial release. And other versions of both concertos are available.
Nelson Goerner is on top of the technical demands of both works, even if there’s not much subtlety to his playing, but the performance of the Paderewski by the Polish National Symphony under Jacek Kaspszyk is ragged and badly tuned, while the Sinfonia Varsovia is only marginally better in the Martucci.
