What are we to make of a boy who died a fortnight before his fifteenth birthday having already composed music that made Liszt reach for a figure of speech about closing up shop? Carl Filtsch is one of those names — like Arriaga, like Lekeu — that haunt the margins of music history, figures whose truncated lives leave us in the impossible position of mourning what was never written rather than celebrating what was.
And yet what was written deserves far more than a footnote.
This disc pairs Filtsch with Thomas Tellefsen, and the pairing is shrewder than it might first appear. Both men orbited Chopin — that gravitational field so commanding it could either launch a satellite into independent orbit or simply pull everything back toward the center. Tellefsen, the Norwegian who spent the better part of his adult life in Paris and who was present at Chopin’s deathbed in 1849, never quite escaped that pull. His Piano Concerto no. 1 in g minor, op. 8 — composed when he was in his mid-twenties — shows a composer who absorbed the Chopin language so thoroughly that the question of influence almost dissolves into something more like fluency in a shared dialect. But here’s the thing: Tellefsen’s concerto has ambitions that reach past what Chopin himself attempted in the genre. The finale in particular is bracingly extrovert, almost swaggering in its virtuosic display — qualities Chopin, with his constitutional preference for the intimate gesture, tended to distrust.
Hubert Rutkowski plays it with exactly the right combination of aristocratic finish and forward momentum. He doesn’t soften the music’s edges to make it sound more like Chopin; he lets Tellefsen be Tellefsen, which is a small critical act of considerable importance. The passagework sings rather than merely glitters. The slow movement — and this is where Tellefsen’s Norwegian origins seem to surface briefly, something in the modal coloring — is given space to breathe without being allowed to go slack.
Tellefsen’s story is its own kind of melancholy. Had he been born in Warsaw or Vienna or Leipzig rather than Trondheim, he might today occupy a place in the standard narrative alongside Thalberg or Kalkbrenner — names that were, for a few decades in the nineteenth century, spoken with the same reverence we now reserve for Liszt. His 44 published opuses are almost entirely for solo piano, a Chopinesque proportion, and the recordings by Acte Préalable documented them with admirable completeness. But the concerto had waited longer for a proper champion.
Filtsch is the more arresting case. Born in Transylvania in 1830 — that detail still carries a frisson — he wrote his Konzertstück in b minor at twelve. Twelve. The Overture in D, a purely orchestral piece, suggests a mind already thinking in larger structural terms than Chopin ever cared to pursue. Chopin wrote no overtures; the form bored or eluded him. That a student of his should attempt one, and not embarrass himself, says something.
The Konzertstück is harder to characterize than comparisons to Chopin’s E minor Concerto might suggest. Yes, there are family resemblances — the lyrical second themes, the particular way the piano enters in relation to the orchestra — but the emotional temperature is different. Stranger, somehow. More compressed. It doesn’t reach the sustained lyrical peaks of the Chopin, but it has a quality of intensity that seems almost too knowing for a twelve-year-old, the musical equivalent of a child who looks at you with eyes that have seen more than they should have.
Lukasz Borowicz and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra are fully committed partners throughout. The orchestral playing in the Filtsch Overture has genuine character — this isn’t a pickup band going through the motions for a specialty label. The ensemble is clean without being antiseptic, and Borowicz shapes phrases with the kind of idiomatic understanding that suggests he has thought about this music, not merely rehearsed it.
The disc sits in a small but growing body of recorded evidence that the Chopin circle contained more than a few epigones. The earlier Naxos collection was valuable; this one goes further, into territory where orchestral forces reveal dimensions of these composers that solo piano recordings simply cannot. Tellefsen’s concerto belongs in the conversation about neglected nineteenth-century concertos — alongside, say, the piano concertos of Alkan, or Henselt’s in f minor, works that the standard repertoire has pushed to the periphery through no particular logic beyond the accidents of historical survival and the conservatism of concert programmers.
Filtsch we can only mourn and marvel at. Tellefsen we can actually come to know.
This release makes a persuasive case for doing both.
