Carl Czerny - Piano Sonata no. 9 in B moll, op. 145 (1/6)

First Movement Allegro con brio The fourth and last of Czerny’s sonatas of 1827, another Grand Fantasie, is the Piano Sonata No. 9 in B minor, op. 145. Czerny dedicated it to the highly influential composer-pianist Ignaz Moscheles (1784-1870), who had, like himself, been close to Beethoven but was then currently living in London. Though not on the heroic scale of Czerny’s Sixth Sonata (see disc 2), the Ninth is, like that work, an impressive and sometimes sombre design in six movements which ranks among his more important piano compositions. His next piano composition, incidentally, would be a Marcia funèbre sulla morte di Luigi van Beethoven, op. 146. The Ninth Sonata’s first movement, marked Allegro con brio, begins with an introductory passage that immediately announces a powerful downward pouncing motif in dotted rhythm, followed by a brief, poignant digression into the Neapolitan region of C major before the exposition proper, in which the pugnacious dotted-rhythm theme emerges as the basis of the fi rst subject. The second subject has two principal ideas, the first of them being a jaunty march and the second a beautifully-worked espressivo theme in two-part counterpoint over a descending bass. The development is entirely concerned with the dotted rhythm motif; the introductory passage returns in the tonic B minor to signal the imminence of the recapitulation, but the first subject is then recapitulated, most unusually, in G-sharp minor, though the second subject arrives orthodoxly in the tonic. The opening motif reappears in G major to kick-start an exciting coda.