EVENTS AND CONCERTS
This page is in a preliminary stage of construction.
Mark Kroll's book "Ignaz Moscheles and the Changing World of Musical Europe" was published in October 2014 by Boydell and Brewer (the Boydell Press): please go to link Ignaz Moscheles by Mark Kroll
This is the first comprehensive new study of Moscheles since Charlotte Moscheles' original 1872 biography of her husband, and contains much new information about his musical life. On the cover is a notable reproduction of the newly rediscovered posthumous 1871 portrait by his son Felix Moscheles. The book also features a short Epilogue on the family by Moscheles' great-great-grandson Henry Roche. Henry may be contacted via this (moscheles.org) website, and welcomes correspondence and enquiries from all interested readers.
On Friday 5 June 2015 at 7.30pm, The Nash Ensemble played Moscheles' Fantasy, Variations and Finale op. 46 for Piano, Violin, Clarinet and Cello, at the Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford-on-Avon, England. Moscheles' Quartet, based on a Bohemian folksong, was published in Vienna in 1819, and the Nash Ensemble's CD of this work, issued in 2006, was recorded live at a concert in the Wigmore Hall London.
On Thursday 25 June 2015 at 12 noon at the Duke's Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London, Moscheles' Homage to Handel for two pianos op.92 was given a very fine performance by Hamish Milne and David Gray.
On Thursday 17 September 2015 a plaster-cast copy of Moscheles' right hand was presented by his great-great-grandson Henry Roche to the Leipzig Hochschule, at which Moscheles was the principal professor of piano and piano-composition from 1846 to 1870. Henry writes "I was received very kindly by the new Director, Professor Martin Kürschner, and his colleagues at the morning session of the Rektorat, when the cast of the hand duly passed into their possession in an informal but very moving ceremony. I was then taken on a tour of the building and saw not only Felix Moscheles' fine portraits of his parents, but also for the first time some unique Moscheles manuscripts held by the Hochschule's library." 
LATEST NEWS OF THREE PERFORMANCES OF MOSCHELES' OVERTURE "JOAN OF ARC" OP.91 BY THE NETHERLANDS PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA (www.orkest.nl) © Henry Roche 2016
On Monday 19th September I was privileged to be in the famous Amsterdam Concertgebouw for the last of three historic performances by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra of Moscheles' Overture Jeanne D'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, very likely its first concert performances for over 150 years. The conductor Ivor Bolton was moved to perform it by hearing the German 1999 CD recording on the radio, and he creatively programmed it with masterworks by Moscheles' foremost musical colleagues, Beethoven's Violin Concerto and Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony. The score and parts of the Moscheles were specially prepared for these performances by John Longstaff. Moscheles wrote this concert overture in 1834, and conducted it at the Philharmonic Society in April the following year. His only purely orchestral work other than the 1828 Symphony, it is a beautiful operatically-inspired tone-poem portraying the devoutness, glory and tragedy of Joan's inner life.
A simple and devotional opening andante religioso becomes gradually underlaid with uneasy rhythms and turbulent harmonies, before opening out into a light woodwind march which then similarly becomes troubled by uncertainty and doubts. Now the main allegro spiritoso blazes forth, a triumphant symphonic movement with echoes of Weber and Wagner, full of dramatic contrasts whose rhythms and energy seem even to foreshadow Bruckner. The woodwind march returns, then the allegro drives forward with greater insistence, until it suddenly melts away into the opening mood of prayerful devotion, which rises seemingly inevitably into a rapt return of the opening theme, now in the minor, which in turn becomes clothed in the form of a hushed and tragic funeral march.
Ivor Bolton seemed thoroughly immersed in and at one with the music's dramatic meaning, and certainly did ample justice to the intricacies and contrasts so essential for its successful performance. The players in turn displayed fine rhythmic clarity and dynamic control, and the warm and enthusiastic applause of the nearly full hall was well deserved. I was reminded how Rossini told Moscheles in 1860 that he had enough flow of melody to write an opera; it is perhaps a shame that he never did, and certainly that such a fine work as this Overture should have remained virtually unknown for so long.
Mention must be made also of Veronika Eberle's rapturously received account of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, and of Bolton's authentically vivid and compelling performance of Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony which proved a fitting culmination to a rewarding and inspiring evening.