**Banquet of Rarities: The Husum Festival’s Inaugural Recording**
There are festivals, and then there are festivals. Most trumpet their prestige through marquee names and lucrative disc contracts. The Festival of Rare Piano Music at Schloss vor Husum—tucked away in Schleswig-Holstein near the Danish border, surrounded by grey North Sea mists and Theodor Storm’s melancholic poetry—has chosen a different path entirely. This is a festival that exists to rescue the forgotten, to champion the transcription (that much-maligned Cinderella of piano literature), and to prove that the standard recital diet of Chopin ballades and Beethoven sonatas represents perhaps five percent of what the piano can actually do.
Danacord’s first volume, drawn from the 1989 festival, makes the case with considerable force.
The programming alone deserves study. Where else would you encounter Alkan’s mystical “Cantique des cantiques” (actually “J’étais endormie, mais mon Coeur veillait“—the liner notes get it wrong, though Ronald Smith’s playing certainly doesn’t) alongside Zez Confrey’s 1921 ragtime showpiece “Kitten on the Keys”? The juxtaposition isn’t mere novelty-seeking. Both pieces demand absolute control of color and rhythm; both explore the piano’s capacity for storytelling through texture rather than conventional melodic development.
Smith opens with that Alkan prelude—the thirteenth from op. 31, originally conceived for organ or pedal piano—and immediately establishes the festival’s aesthetic. This isn’t about rediscovering “lost masterpieces” in some misguided attempt to dethrone Chopin. It’s about expanding our sense of what constitutes a satisfying musical experience. Busoni championed Alkan as “the greatest of the post-Beethoven piano composers,” which tells you more about Busoni’s provocative temperament than Alkan’s actual stature. But this particular prelude—quiet, sensuously chromatic, almost Scriabinesque in its harmonic suspension—deserves its occasional appearances in recital. Smith plays it with appropriate restraint, letting the harmonies breathe.
Michael Ponti’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Serenade (the fifth of the op. 3 Morceaux de fantasie) offers little that’s revelatory interpretively, but the piece itself charms. The story behind its composition—Rachmaninoff so flattered by Tchaikovsky’s newspaper praise that he sat down and composed a fifth piece on the spot—reminds us that even great composers were susceptible to vanity. The Spanish inflections here anticipate the later op. 33 Études-tableaux, though without their psychological depth.
But then we arrive at Godowsky.
Marc-André Hamelin’s performance of Study no. 42—Godowsky’s reimagining of Chopin’s “Winter Wind” Étude with the right-hand figuration transferred to the left—is worth the price of admission alone. I’ve heard Hamelin’s complete Godowsky cycle, of course, and this represents him at perhaps twenty-five percent capacity. Which tells you something about Godowsky’s diabolic imagination. The chromatic cascades that Chopin assigns to the right hand become, in Godowsky’s version, a left-hand nightmare of crossed fingers and suppressed pedal. Hamelin tosses it off with the kind of nonchalance that makes you want to throw your hands up in despair—or admiration. Probably both.
His encore, Confrey’s “Kitten on the Keys,” provides blessed relief. And here’s where the festival’s programming philosophy truly shines. Confrey was infinitely more sophisticated than Joplin—there, I’ve said it. His harmonic vocabulary, his rhythmic complexity, his sheer pianistic imagination put him closer to Billy Mayerl territory. (The Wise Cracker Suite and Moods of a New Yorker deserve recordings immediately.) Hamelin plays this with affectionate precision, never condescending to the material.
Jozef De Beenhouwer contributes a genuine discovery: Heinrich von Sahr’s Larghetto from Stimmen der Nacht, op. 3. Sahr, a friend of Beethoven’s, wrote this in 1854—which makes the piece’s harmonic adventurousness all the more striking. It’s quiet, introspective, strangely modern in its avoidance of conventional cadential patterns. De Beenhouwer plays it with appropriate mystery, though I wish the recorded sound gave us more of the lower register’s rumbling.
The Sterndale Bennett Rondeau à la Polonaise—I confess I didn’t know this piece existed—emerges as considerably more than Mendelssohn pastiche, though the influence is certainly there. Hamish Milne, who also contributes a fine performance of Medtner’s C Minor Fairy Tale (op. 8, no. 2), plays the Bennett with enough rhythmic snap to suggest genuine character. We’ve been unfair to Sterndale Bennett. The piano concerti alone should guarantee him more than footnote status in English music history.
Bizet’s “Départ” from Chants du Rhin is pleasant salon music, nothing more—though Jean-Marc Luisada plays it as if he’s discovered late Brahms. The two Fauré Nocturnes (op. 33, no. 2 and op. 119, no. 13) receive sensitive performances from Luisada and Idil Biret respectively, though I’m not sure what they’re doing on a disc supposedly devoted to rarities. The later Nocturne does show Fauré moving toward Debussyan harmonic ambiguity, I suppose.
Peter Froundjian, one of the festival’s founders, contributes Palmgren’s “Feux-follets” and Grainger’s transcription of Fauré’s song “Nell.” The Palmgren—sixty-three seconds of will-o‘-the-wisp figuration—sounds like Liszt filtered through Sibelius. The Grainger arrangement, published in 1924 as part of his Free Settings of Favourite Melodies, proves what a Busoni-trained pianist could do with a simple mélodie. Froundjian plays both with considerable flair.
The disc concludes with four transcriptions of varying merit. Balakirev’s version of Glinka’s “The Lark
