To follow in Beethoven's footsteps by writing a new set of Diabelli Variations takes confidence in spades; Beethoven's own set, the 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120, is one of the profound landmarks of his celebrated late period. German composer
Franz Hummel -- appropriately named for the project, but apparently no relation to Johann Nepomuk Hummel -- has undertaken various ambitious projects and actually fares well with this challenge. He writes in his rather murky booklet notes (in German, English, and French) that his variations "remain separate" from Beethoven's work, and moreover that the ordering of his own variations is "untamed and random." But of course the expectations the listener brings from the Beethoven set are essential, and
Hummel by no means ignores them. The first variation takes off from Diabelli's flouncing theme in the same fashion as Beethoven's and announces the tonal orientation of
Hummel's set. The slow variations fall in roughly the same places, and the general relation of variation to theme follows a similar ebb and flow. The slow pieces, indeed, are the weakest;
Hummel has nothing to offer that compares with the groundbreaking chromatic experiments of Beethoven's variations, and they seem to noodle. This said,
Hummel indeed manages to depart from Beethoven's model in interesting ways. He extends the tonality a bit, and his most interesting gambit is to incorporate bits of Diabelli's actual theme into his variations. He seems to suggest the possibility of meeting points between Diabelli's theme and his own variations; in Beethoven's work the theme is basically nothing more than a jumping-off point. He writes that his variations were "truly improvistory" and "grabbed out of the very air," and he seems to posit improvisation as a way of building bridges between the popular musical world of Diabelli's theme and of the "classical" variations. Indeed, his inclusion of a jazz variation at the end fits into this line of thinking. Argentine pianist
Carmen Piazzini is equal to the considerable technical challenges of both works --
Hummel was a famed concert pianist before turning to composition -- and her reading of the Beethoven variations on disc 2 is appropriately straightfoward.