Czerny: Salon and Brilliant Works by Toccata Classics

Czerny is one of those figures classical music keeps in a drawer labeled “useful but minor” — a designation that tells you more about our prejudices than about the music. Yes, he wrote the études. Millions of children have cursed his name across two centuries of practice rooms. But the man who taught Liszt, who transcribed virtually the entire Beethoven piano output, who sat at the center of Viennese musical life for sixty years — that Czerny is a different proposition entirely. This new disc from Toccata Classics goes some way toward making the case.

The four works gathered here are salon music, unapologetically so. Three of them have “brillant” somewhere in the title, which was not mere advertising copy — it was a contract with the audience, a promise of glitter and display. Biedermeier Vienna ran on such promises. The pianoforte had become the bourgeoisie’s status object of choice, and Czerny — gentle, reclusive, famously averse to the concert platform himself — understood the market with the clarity of someone who taught its children six days a week.

What he produced for that market deserves a closer look. The Grandes Variations brillantes et concertantes, op. 285, nominally draws on Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi — a work that was, in 1833, still fresh from its Venice premiere and burning through European opera houses. Czerny takes the bel canto material and does what he always does: he organizes it, burnishes it, sends it through its paces with a kind of affectionate thoroughness. The variations accumulate momentum rather than depth, but the craftsmanship is real. Voice-leading that could have been perfunctory is actually thought through. The second piano is no mere accompanist — the two instruments engage in something close to genuine dialogue, trading melodic fragments with the ease of old friends finishing each other’s sentences.

The op. 376 Fantaisie et Variations on I Puritani comes from 1837, the year Bellini had been dead for two years and his stock was, if anything, rising. Czerny’s treatment is more extroverted here, the variations more decorative than developmental. It is not Schumann. It is not trying to be.

Jingshu Zhao and Haoyue Liang play all four works with an ensemble that borders on the uncanny — intonation of attack, matching of tone color, a shared sense of phrase shape that suggests either long collaboration or genuine musical sympathy, possibly both. In the Rondo brillant in B-flat major, op. 321, the four-hand writing requires the two players to function as a single organism, and they very nearly do. There are moments where the treble figuration in Zhao’s right hand shimmers against Liang’s bass articulation with an almost physical precision — you can hear the hammers landing together.

The Duo brillant et concertant, op. 358 — two pianos again, B-flat major again, Czerny apparently had a preference — is the most substantial piece on the disc, structurally speaking. It runs through its argument with more conviction than one might expect, and the slow movement, such as it is, has a melodic simplicity that feels earned rather than merely easy. This is not a profound work. But it is a competent and occasionally charming one, and in the right hands it makes its case.

Toccata Classics has been doing this kind of excavation for years, and they do it well. The recorded sound at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge is clean and present without being clinical — you get the sense of instruments in a room, which is exactly right for music that was made to be heard in rooms. The balance between the two instruments is handled with care; neither piano is flattered at the expense of the other.

Where does this leave us? Czerny is never going to be Schubert. The music on this disc does not transform, does not devastate, does not leave you changed. But it is far better than its reputation — or rather, far better than the reputation of the man’s name, which most people associate with five-finger exercises and childhood drudgery rather than with the sophisticated craftsman who had Beethoven’s confidence and Liszt’s gratitude. Zhao and Liang are persuasive advocates, and if the cause they’re advocating is limited, it is not trivial. Worth hearing.