Leonardo Pierdomenico A master at St Mary’s A memorable recital by a great artist

Impossible to arrive on time for this concert with Erica Piccotti who was recently a guest in my house in London with Leonardo Pierdomenico for concerts together at Bob Boas Salon and at the RAM for the prestigious Cello Gold.

I am happy to enclose an article I wrote about them on that occasion.

I was supporting a very talented young pianist Jacopo Petrucci from the school of Benedetto Lupo who I had recently heard in Florence in his complete Beethoven Series :

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/12/07/lupo-gatti-in-florence-lift-up-your-hearts/)

Jacopo unfortunately for me was performing the other side of this ‘Infernal’ City for Roma 3 ‘s magnificent ‘Young Artists Piano Solo Series’ that offers a platform to many super talented young pianists (https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/01/25/__trashed/) Jacopo had also been a student of Orazio Maione in l’Aquila before taking wing and flying down to Rome .Orazio whose mother’s 100th anniversary we celebrated in Naples recently.

Naples pays homage to Annamaria Pennella

I had done my homework though for one of my favourite works .

The Double Concerto op 102 was Brahms’ final work for orchestra. It was composed in the summer of 1887, and first performed on 18 October of that year in the Gurzenich in Cologne, Germany.Brahms approached the project with anxiety over writing for instruments that were not his own.He wrote it for the cellist Robert Hausmann , a frequent chamber music collaborator,and his old but estranged friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim .The concerto was, in part, a gesture of reconciliation towards Joachim, after their long friendship had ruptured following Joachim’s divorce from his wife Amalie ( Brahms had sided with Amalie in the dispute.)

The concerto makes use of the musical motif A–E–F, a permutation of F–A–E, which stood for a personal motto of Joachim, Frei aber einsam (“free but lonely”).Thirty-four years earlier, Brahms had been involved in a collaborative work using the F-A-E motif in tribute to Joachim: the F-A- E Sonata of 1853.

Joachim and Hausmann performed the concerto, with Brahms at the podium, several times in its initial 1887–88 season, and Brahms gave the manuscript to Joachim, with the inscription “To him for whom it was written.” Clara Schumann reacted unfavourably to the concerto, considering the work “not brilliant for the instruments”.Richard Specht also thought critically of the concerto, describing it as “one of Brahms’ most inapproachable and joyless compositions”. Brahms had sketched a second concerto for violin and cello but destroyed his notes in the wake of its cold reception.Later critics have warmed to it: Donald Tovey wrote of the concerto as having “vast and sweeping humour”.

Casals and Thibaud recorded it with Cortot conducting in 1929: https://youtube.com/watch?v=90h1x-Rd9bE&feature=shared