“He plays Beethoven with a sort of ‘glow’…always a lovely sound - gorgeous!” - Sir Mark Elder of Jayson Gillham.
Performed by Jayson Gillham with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Giordano Bellincampi.
Jayson Gillham Photo: Andy Holdsworth
Jayson Gillham was born and raised in Queensland and now lives in London, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. He’s won prizes at many of the world’s leading piano competitions, including the prestigious Leeds competition, but it was his 2014 win of the Montreal International Music competition that brought him to international attention. He’s particularly known as an exponent of Beethoven.
Oddly enough, Beethoven's Piano Concerto Number 1 should really be called the Piano Concerto Number 3!
It was in fact the third piano concerto Beethoven wrote, but it’s called No 1 because it was the first one to be published.
Recently scholars have reconstructed a piano concerto that he’d written at the age of thirteen, and this was followed a few years later by what we now call the Piano Concerto No 2, but that was published after No 1.
This explains why the piano concerto No 1 is more advanced and adventurous in several ways than No 2, including having a larger orchestra, now with trumpets and drums and a classic ‘military’ feel.
And more importantly, it’s much bigger in scale; the first movement alone is about 17 minutes long, and would have been the longest yet heard in Vienna when it was premiered in 1795 in a concert, organised by Haydn, that included three of his London Symphonies as well as this big concerto. (Audiences possibly had longer attention spans in those days!)
Another striking feature of this concerto is the massive cadenza in the first movement, which Beethoven wrote out and added in later. It’s futuristic, unpredictable, and out of scale with the rest of the piece.
Text by Indra Hughes
Recorded by RNZ Concert, 8 November 2018
Producer: Tim Dodd; Sound engineer: Adrian Hollay
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