Locating the early-romantic British piano concerto

British solo piano concertos of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although still generally unknown, were surprisingly numerous and high in quality. Although Muzio Clementi produced only one surviving concerto, Johann Baptist Cramer wrote as many as eight, between the 1790s and about 1820; Cipriani Potter produced three during the 1830s, William Sterndale Bennett contributing six between 1832 and 1848. Beyond this is the work of more obscure figures, such as the London-based pianist and organist George Eugene Griffin, who wrote three piano concertos in the early 1800s. Recent scholarship has revived a progressively widening expanse of unfamiliar concertos by continental contemporaries, leaving British figures comparatively neglected. Focusing on the concertos of Clementi, Cramer and Bennett, this chapter explores the relationship between them and the ‘Classical’ works of Mozart and Beethoven that British concerto composers promoted as performers, teachers and administrators. The discussion will take into account aesthetic similarities and differences as well as factors of style and structure. In their concertos, the perpetuation, or recapturing, of eighteenth-century approaches tends to be intermixed with palpable responses to the enterprises of continental virtuoso-concerto composers, meaning that British concertos to some extent reflect broad trends in the development of the early-Romantic solo concerto. However, with their contrapuntal syntax and, in the case of Bennett, sonata-type finales pursuing intensive thematic development, British concertos often imply an elevated, even ‘learned’, conception of the genre. Arising from such tendencies is the possibility of defining a distinctively ‘British’ approach to the early nineteenth-century solo piano concerto.