Sergey Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 4 & Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

The Naxos label, so well known and regarded for high-quality and modestly-priced classical recordings, has a series of historical works that might be a problem for audiophiles, but present truly classic performances.

In this case, you can't get much more notable than two of the concertos (though not the notoriously difficult and renowed third) of the great Sergey Rachmaninov, performed by the maestro, with the renowned Philadelphia Orchestra under two of the greatest conductors of the 20th century in Eugene Ormandy and Leopold Stokowski.

Recorded between 1939 and 1941, these performances make up for lack of stereo sound what they possess in boundless amounts:  sheer technical and emotional brilliance.  Even though the composer was within a few years of his 1943 passing and his best-known concert days were from the World War I era, it is truly a treat to hear him playing with such precision and passion some of his best-known concertos. 

Amazingly, the liners indicate, Rachmaninov's hands were so large that he could span a chord of a thirteenth (this is twelve keys apart) on his left hand and could do so on a tenth on his right by using the first finger on the lower note and then hitting the upper by thumb crossing.  This kind of technique obviously required enormous amounts of practice as well as physical gift. 

Rachmaninov left his native Russia in the wake of the revolution of 1917 and resided in America for some years before moving to Europe.  With the outbreak of World War II, however, he found himself back in the U.S., where he spent his remaining years touring with a regularity not found since his performing heyday of a quarter-century or so before.

While the composer and pianist is in great form, so is the famed Philadelphia Orchestra under its legendary conductors.  Stokowski, of Irish and Polish extraction, was born in London in 1882 and came to New York in his early 20s as an organist of note.  His first conducting spot was in Paris in 1908 and, within a few years, held the baton in Philadelphia, where he was conductor for a quarter-century.  Stokowski continued to conduct, however, until his death at age 95.

During the last two years of Stokowski's tenure, Eugene Ormandy joined the orchestra.  Born in Hungary in 1899, he was a violinist and arrived in America in the early 1920s.  He worked in an orchestra accompanying silent movies and conducted serious music before becoming conductor with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, where he was well-known for his recordings.  After Stokowski passed the baton on to him, Ormandy led the Philadelphia Orchestra for 35 highly productive and well-known years, retiring in 1973.  He died a dozen years later.

Rachmaninov's first piano concerto was completed in 1891, when still in his teens, and revised it in 1917.  The fourth concerto was finished in 1926 and debuted under Stokowski's baton in Philadelphia in the spring of the next year.  The work, however, was revised in 1941 and recorded under Ormandy's conducting.

The "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" was completed in 1934 and debuted that year with Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.  It involves variations on the theme of the 24th and final caprice of the famed 19th-century violinist Niccoló Paganini and runs about 25 minutes long, about the same length of the each of the piano concertos.

It is one thing to hear great music performed by a fine orchestra, but quite another to have the composer as the featured soloist.  This fantastic historical recording is a remarkable document of a top-flight ensemble, conductors of the first order, and a superlative composer and performer.

Béla Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra/The Miraculous Mandarin/Two Pictures

Béla Bartok (1881-1945) and Franz Liszt (1811-1886) are the best-known composers from Hungary, though they came from very different eras, had varied stylistic concerns, and were dissimilar in other ways. 

Bartok came from a town in what is now Romania, but from Hungarian and German parentage, and his father was an amateur musician (working as the head of an agricultural college) while his mother provided him his first piano lessons. 

After his father died when Bartok as a boy, his mother took up teaching at Bratislava in what is now Slovakia, bordering Hungary and Austria.  Though the young man could have studied in Vienna, the great music center, he chose to go to Budapest to continue his musical education. 

In his mid-twenties he began teaching in that city's Academy of Music and soon immersed himself in the folk music of Hungary and nearby areas, including Romania.  Because of the remarkable political, social and cultural history of southeastern Europe, including its many years as part of the Ottoman Empire emanating from Turkey, the cross-breeding of music there with antecedents from the Middle East and from Europe allowed Bartok to develop a composing style that reflected those influences.  His work included such pieces as "Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs" and "Romanian Folk Dances."

This Sony Classics recording under its "Essential Classics" banner was an early purchase, back in the first years of the 90s, for this listener of Bartok's music.  It presents orchestral works from very different eras of the composer's career, ranging from the early "Two Pictures from Orchestra" from 1910 to a suite for a dance and pantomime called "The Miraculous Mandarin" from about a decade later to the masterpiece "Concerto for Orchestra" that proved to be one of his last works, dating from 1943, after Bartok fled war-torn Hungary for the United States.  The performances by the famed conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra date from 1962 and 1963.

The latter work, spanning about 37 minutes, seems like a contradiction in his titling, but the composer observed that, while a concerto typically highlights a solo instrument with an orchestral accompaniment, the virtuosity of both justify the use of the term.  In any case, this five-movement piece has moments of mystery, exoticism, unusual groupings of instruments, vivid emotionalism in the melodies, and compelling tonal colorations and textures. 

"The Miraculous Mandarin" begins with a dramatic swirling of sounds from strings and brass and maintains its frenetic tempo and sounds for the first minute and a half in what was then a controversial tale involving a woman forced into prostitution and the attempt of a mandarin to take her away from her pimps before it moves into a different type of dramatic sound, involving what might be car horns and other reflections of an urban environment, leavened with some quieter passages involving woodwinds and then the return of drama reflecting the conflict between the mandarin and the pimps.  There is a great richness, a superb sense of dramatic timing, and a fascinating grouping of instrumentation on this remarkable piece.

"Two Pieces" has an affinity for the work of French composer Claude Debussy, in that Bartok scores these two parts, "In Full Flower" and "Village Dance" in ways that employ dreamy melodies and lush backgrounds reminiscent of the influential Debussy's invocation of nature and Impressionistic approaches to sound.  With such instruments as harp and celesta, the generous use of tremolo with the stringed instruments and other elements, these works still have a blueprint of Bartok's future use of unusual rhythms, groupings of instruments and sense of dramatic dynamism.

This recording is a nice survey of the long career of one of the great composers of the first half of the 20th century.  Sadly, Bartok, who was strongly against the invasion of Hungary by the Nazi regime, fled his native country in October 1940, though his older son by a first wife remained in Hungary and survived the war while the composer, his second wife and their son moved to New York.

He was not particularly appreciated in his new country and he struggled to compose and find work.  In 1944, he was diagnosed with leukemia and the disease moved quickly.  Still, in his last years he managed to not only complete the popular "Concerto for Orchestra" but also an excellent solo violin sonata for the legendary Yehudi Menuhin and a third piano concerto. 

At age 64, in late September 1945, the composer died and only ten persons were present at his funeral.  Although he was buried in New York, Bartok's remains were removed to his native Hungary where he received a state funeral in 1988, just before the fall of the Communist regime there.  Fortunately, his music is better appreciated in this country than it was during his final years and there is a series of piano works on the budget Naxos label by Hungarian pianist Jenó Jandó that will be highlighted here some day.