South Africa leading from the front in a Virtual Concert
Putting the Czerny Nonet on the stage has been a dream of Brooklyn Theatre since 2003.
A world video premier of Carl Czerny’s Nonet www.artmusic.tv
With funding from the Rupert Music Foundation and in collaboration with RSG, an audio and video recording of this work was made in the M1A studio at the SABC. Nine top SA musicians are featured. Peter Cartwright (piano), Carli d’Alebout (violin 1), Christopher Evans (violin 2), Ken Craig (viola), Wernd van Staden (cello), Jurgens de Lange (double bass), Lizet Smit (clarinet) Johan Ferreira ( Cor Anglais) and Esther Watkinson (bassoon).
The sound recording was made by Frik Wallis and the multi-camera video recording by Artmusic.TV camera team under the direction of Willem Vogel.
The video of Salon Music’s presentation of Carl Czerny’s adaptation of the Mozart Requiem for piano duet, featuring pianists Wessel van Wyk and Willem de Beer, during the 2018 Easter Concert at Brooklyn Theater, has been viewed by 117,000 people worldwide to date. This is the only recording of this work, in the world.
During the annual Piano Extravaganza concerts with 4 grand pianos and 8 pianists, Czerny’s original works as well as arrangements were often presented with great acclaim, among others, his great Sonata for 4 pianists on 4 pianos
In 2002, the first Carl Czerny Festival was hosted in Edmonton, Canada, with pianist Anton Kuerti as the festival’s founder. The festival has since been on the musical calendar of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra annually. With the more than 1,000 works that Czerny has written, there is certainly heaps of repertoire to fill these annual festival programs.
At the age of 8, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) was taken by his father to Beethoven’s house to play for him. The great master was so impressed that he insisted on teaching the child. This was the beginning of a long association between Czerny and Beethoven until Beethoven’s death in 1827.
Czerny’s Nonet D.803 was written in 1850 and the original score and parts are housed in the City Library in Vienna. In 1995, the Consortium Classicum recorded the work on the MDG record label for the first time. The instrumentation is for 9 instruments – a piano, clarinet, English horn, bassoon, and string quintet. It is in fact a full piano Concerto in 4 movements accompanied by 8 instruments. Like most Czerny works, the piano part is technically highly challenging.
Consortium Classicum’s recording is the Nonet’s only existing audio document. No other recording has been made or posted on Youtube since. This is probably due to the fact that the sheet music was very difficult to obtain.
A major Czerny enthusiast, F. Lee Eiseman, on the board of the Harvard Musical Association in Boston, USA, commissioned Matthieu D’Ordine in 2019 to print the sheet music of the Nonet from the Vienna Library as a printed version. These scores and instrumental parts were then made available to the public free of charge at the Petrucci Music Library on the internet.
The Czerny Nonet is presented in the Artmusic.TV program along with Schubert’s well-known Trout Quintet and will be released on this platform on Friday night, August 27th.
Tickets are available at www.artmusic.tv – telephone inquiries can be directed to 012 460 6033.