John Field: Piano Concerto No.5 in C dur, H.39, 'L'incendie par l'orage', Miceal O'Rourke

John Field - Piano Concerto No.5 in C-dur, H.39, 'L'Incendie par l'orage', Miceal O'Rourke (piano), London Mozart Players, Matthias Bamert, conductor
I. Allegro moderato – 00:00
II. Adagio – 17:14 --
III. Rondo. Allegro – 19:30

“John Field (26 July 1782 – 23 January 1837) was an Irish pianist, composer, and teacher. He was born in Dublin into a musical family. John early on displayed unusual musical ability, making his debut as a pianist at the Rotunda Assembly Rooms in that city when he was only nine years old. The following year his family moved to London, and Field was soon placed under the musical care of Muzio Clementi.
Field began to perform in public in London concerts from 1793 on, (playing, among other repertoire, concertos by Dussek), but the very few compositions surviving from the years before the appearance of the first piano concerto give no clue to the technique that had been building up during his teenage years. So the concert given at the King Theatre on 7 February 1794 marked the true beginning of Field's career as a composer.
The concert was a huge success, the critic in the Morning Post declaring that “anything more calculated to display rapidity of execution, attended with characteristic musical expression, we never heard”. Three years later he accompanied Clementi on an extended journey through Paris and Vienna and on to Russia where he was to settle permanently, soon making a name for himself in both St Petersburg and Moscow. As the first great virtuoso pianist to reside in Russia, Field was in his lifetime lionized by Russian musical society. The most sought-after pedagogue of his day, he was the father-figure of a long line of Russian pianists in a tradition which, happily, is still with us today, and his unprecedented use of certain technical devices and pedal effects were to find echoes in composers from Schumann and Liszt to Rachmaninoff and Debussy.

Piano Concerto No. 5, 'The Blazing Storm', one of the most colourful of all piano concertos, was inspired by the continuing success of a concerto subtitled The Storm written in 1798 by the German-born Daniel Steibelt who also lived and worked in St Petersburg. Though Field and Steibelt were apparently on friendly terms, there was inevitably some rivalry and Field's new concerto, begun in 1815, was calculated to outdo the programmatic effects of the earlier work. There is also a musical nod in the direction of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony which had appeared seven years before. All three movements of this concerto are in C major and the two principal themes of the Allegro moderato are both gentle and lyrical, giving no hint of the drama to come. The first section of the movement is rounded off with a brief passage similar to one in the famous Nocturne No. 5. Only when the development section is well underway do rumbles of thunder on the timpani foreshadow the eruption of a storm. There are some exciting sound effects suggesting lightning, downpours of rain and gusts of wind. At one moment an unexpected harmonic digression is pointed by an enormous crash on the tam-tam, an instrument heard in no other piano concerto. Public sensitivity to the idea of fire and destruction at this period was acute following Napoleon's invasion of Moscow three years earlier, so this episode could have sent shock waves through Field's Russian audiences.” (from album notes by Eve Barsham)