Niels Wilhelm Gade: Piano Works – Michele Tozzetti

The name and personality of Niels Wilhelm Gade are well known among music specialists, but unfortunately largely ignored by the mainstream concert repertoire and its audiences. And this is an unfair and regrettable situation, since Gade is an important figure under both the historical and the artistic viewpoint. His two series of Aquarelles for the piano are intended as musical parallels to aquarelle paintings, sharing many of their features with their visual counterparts, while his Volkstänze/Phantasiestücke op. 31 are technically and musically more demanding than the Aquarelles, and display the same variety of inspiration and somewhat capricious nature of Schumann’s eponymous works. The most important piano work written by Gade, however, is his Piano Sonata, whose final version was inspired by the composer’s study of Liszt’s B-minor Piano Sonata. Beyond the boundaries of music nationalism, Gade can and should be considered as a reference figure for European music and musicians in the second half of the nineteenth century.