New recordings of large-scale but little-known works by one of Beethoven’s most influential students.

Born like his teacher-to-be in the German city of Bonn, Ferdinand Ries studied with Beethoven in Vienna for several years during the first decade of the 19th century. He also worked for Beethoven as a copyist and secretary, and in 1838, shortly before his own death at the age of 53, published the first authoritative account of his master’s life. But Ries was far more than a mere amanuensis, as a series of releases on Brilliant Classics has documented, with valuable modern recordings of solo, chamber and instrumental music.

Ries’s own instrument was naturally the piano, and his catalogue of works for the instrument spans light-hearted miniatures and ambitiously scaled, dramatic sonatas, much as Beethoven’s did. In the latter category falls the Grande Sonata Fantasia which Ries composed in 1811 (the same year as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony). It is easy enough to hear the turbulent textures and melodic shapes of his teacher’s famous ‘Pathétique’ Sonata in the background, but Ries could exercise his own imagination, which in any case was shaped by travel far beyond the lands around Vienna, unlike Beethoven.

The weight of the sonata’s singular form falls on the huge Presto finale, making considerable demands on the artist, which Gianluca Faragli conquers with the aid of a superbly conditioned modern Fazioli piano. The sonata’s designation as a ‘fantasia’ indicates that Ries was anticipating the Romantic era’s preoccupation with personal expression as the over-riding concern of creative art, and Faragli has coupled Op.26 with three more fantasies. Two of them are based on themes from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro: display pieces, but by no means frivolous, any more than the darker subject of Schiller’s poem ‘Resignation’ which inspired Ries to compose one of his most inwardly affecting works, written in the south London suburb of Clapham in 1821.

In a lighter vein, Faragli adds the gypsy-style Introduction and Rondo composed once Ries had returned to Vienna with his English wife and three children. Thus the album surveys the course of Ries’s creative life, as the pianist Alessandro Taverna elucidates in a detailed booklet essay.