The fortepiano from Silbermann to Pleyel

Keyboard concertos became increasingly common from the mid-1730s but seem to have been written only for the harpsichord or organ even when the piano was an increasingly familiar instrument. It is curious that the first piano concerto should appear in London, where the piano was a latecomer, and as late as 1769, but this perhaps reflects both the European history of the instrument and London's importance as a centre for musical innovation.

Cristofori's gravicembalo col piano e forte, invented around the end of the 17th century, was an eminently practical form of the instrument that from at least the 1720s was fitted with a brilliantly designed repetition action. With its warm, fluting tone and wide dynamic range, a melodic line could be moulded and inflected to imitate the human voice. Information on the new instrument spread rapidly. The Saxon organ and harpsichord maker Gottfried Silbermann (1683-1753) was one of the most distinguished makers to follow Cristofori's lead, his later work suggesting that he had seen one of the new Florentine pianos in Dresden. There was, however, another influence on Silbermann's work: the pantalon. A virtuoso player of the eponymous dulcimer, Pantaleon Hebenstreit (1669-1750), had taken the musical capitals of Europe by storm and was appointed Pantaleonist to the Dresden court in 1714. Gottfried Silbermann built pantalons for Hebenstreit until 1727, and would have made them for other performers if not prevented by a legal ruling. One of the novel musical effects that so entranced Hebenstreit's audiences was the long sustained, melodious ringing of arpeggios across the entire compass of the instrument. Silbermann might have been prevented from making pantalons, but instead he introduced a device to his pianos to imitate the pantalon's sustained arpeggios. Two hand-stops above the keyboard allow a player to lift either the treble or bass dampers, or the entire range together. In 1756 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach remarked that: 'The undamped register of the pianoforte is the most pleasing and, once the performer learns to observe the necessary precautions in the face of its reverberations, the most delightful for improvisation.'

The piano was little known in England until the devastation of the Seven Years' War brought refugee Saxon instrument makers to London. By the mid-1760s Johann Zumpe had established a workshop making small pianos in the form of clavichords. In Burney's words, 'the tone was very sweet, and the touch, with a little use, equal to any degree of rapidity'. Their simplified Cristofori/Silbermann action had neither escapement nor check, but they were fitted with stop-levers to raise the bass and treble dampers in the manner of Silbermann's pianos. Anyone who has played one of these instruments learns that one of the most satisfactory effects is created when the stop-knobs are used to raise the dampers so the piano may be used pantalon-style. When the treble dampers alone are raised, the treble's delicate, precise sound is surrounded by a halo of tone that sustains the musical line but seldom obscures it, and the bass accompaniment remains completely clear. Just such an effect is used by David Owen Norris in his recording of The world's first piano concertos (Avie AV0014, rec 2002). Accompanied with faultless taste and beauty of tone by Sonnerie led by Monica Huggett, Norris captivates us with his sensitive and nimble playing of a 1769 Zumpe & Buntebart instrument in a group of piano concertos by Johann Christian Bach, Carl Friedrich Abel and James Hook. Pride of place is, however, given to a concerto in A major by Philip Hayes, Professor of Music at Oxford, whose fame rests on the publication of this very first piano concerto of 1769. Mozart also finds a place as the arranger in concerto form of J. C. Bach's Sonata op.5 no.3. For this work, Norris uses a second piano of about 1778 attributed to Zumpe, and whose soundboard is signed by Bach. This piano was recently discovered near St Germain-en-Laye where in 1778 Bach invited Mozart to join him at the home of the...