Friedrich von Flotow was a true one-hit wonder of Romantic music; his opera Martha is virtually the only work of his that has been performed for decades. In his own time he was a successful musician, dividing his time between northern Germany and Paris and eventually becoming the musical director of the theater at Schwerin, for which he composed the two attractive pieces of theater music heard at the end of this disc. The two piano concertos come from earlier in his career; they were composed in 1830 and 1831. These are real rarities; the second is apparently receiving not just its premiere on recordings but its world premiere of any kind. And the amazing thing is that it's by far the most interesting of the four works on the album. These concertos were written shortly after
Flotow finished his studies in Paris, but nothing could have prepared his teachers for this work. It may well be the first piano concerto written in four-movement symphonic form, and its opening Andantino, with the piano immediately picking up and expanding a short minor-key orchestral cell, seems to point forward to
Brahms, who wasn't even born yet. The first concerto is less striking formally, but it too has its surprises, such as a very festive moment toward the end of the first movement where the brasses enter and assert control. Pianist
Carl Petersson and the
Pilsen Philharmonic (hope they get free beer at rehearsal) play with a fine sense of the young composer's ebullience in a nice feat of rediscovery.