Alan Bush - Piano Concerto (First Movement)

Alan Bush: Piano Concerto, Op 18
First Movement: Con moto moderato ma deciso
Rolf Hind, piano
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin, conductor
BBC Broadcast, December 2000
Alternative recording of the BBC live broadcast uploaded in full here (this is the same performance): • Alan Bush: Piano Conce... . The work has never been officially recorded.
Completed while staying next to Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler, in Denmark, Bush called the Piano Concerto, completed in late 1937, his "first political work". (At the premiere in Broadcasting House, London, 1938, conductor Adrian Boult cut short applause by playing the National Anthem.)
"Playing on this occasion for just under 55 minutes, the scale of Bush's concerto is exceeded only by the Busoni (and no doubt those, all awaiting performance, by Sorabji). Yet while the latter is an apotheosis of musical romanticism before the onset of Busoni's often rarified mature idiom, the Bush is recognisably an extension of the powerfully focused approach that had already yielded the superb Dialectic for string quartet, amongst other chamber and vocal works. Like Busoni, Bush marries a strongly wrought formal architecture to a final vocal section which makes explicit the work's aesthetic: here, the need for communist equity in a divided and unequal world [...] The substantial opening movement evolves as an elaborate march fantasy, with virtuoso piano writing".
(Richard Whitehouse)
"The first movement is marked "Con moto moderato ma deciso" and begins with the moto perpetuo idea which constitutes the first subject introduced by the piano at the outset, accompanied by pizzicato chords from the strings. This theme is then taken up by the upper strings. One of the major characteristics of Bush's works of this period (i.e. before the 1950s) is their tightly constructed nature - the initial motifs presented at the outset are subsequently worked out throughout the rest of the piece. Such is the case with Dialectic for String Quartet (1929) and the first movement of the First Symphony of 1940. Even the more restrained cantabile sections of the first movement of the Piano Concerto which provide the necessary relief from the whirring first subject are clearly derived from the opening material and there is scarcely a page which is not concerned with the working out of the initial theme.
Alan Bush's Piano Concerto is conceived on the grandest of scales and in a determinedly virtuosic style (the massive five-movement, seventy-minute Busoni Piano Concerto with Choral Finale (1904) acted as an inspiration, the composer telling his friend Michael Tippett in the mid-1930s that he wanted to write a work on the scale of the Busoni work, complete with choral Finale). The tremendous sweep of the writing should not make us lose sight of the careful working out of the thematic material evident in each of the four movements. The writing for orchestra throughout the work is telling and restrained whilst tuttis are employed sparingly and with taste. The pianist has a Herculean task to perform but the many testing passages are not mere hollow pyrotechnics but grow naturally out of the musical narrative. All four movements have tremendous sweep and style, generating nervous, pulsating rhythms which drive the Concerto ever onward."
(Paul Conway)