It was at these sessions, as I recently wrote in my
review of Cembal d’Amour CD 112, amidst the hubbub of a raucous
recording studio, that Adrian Boult noticed that Mindru Katz was quietly
playing Bach to himself. He motioned for the orchestra to stop talking
and together they listened as Katz, oblivious, carried on. "I never
knew he had it in him" the conductor subsequently wrote and it
was doubtless the repertoire they were recording that had led him to
think that – Prokofiev and Khachaturian. That Katz proved himself over
many years to be no rabble-rousing, arid tub-thumper is not in doubt
and that the return of his performances to the catalogue is a worthy
undertaking is equally true.
If I have a complaint about Cembal d’Amour it concerns
their documentation. Issued under licence from EMI there’s no inkling
as to when and where these recordings were made. According to Alan Sanders’
Boult discography they date from a three-day intensive period between
18 and 20 December 1958; the location was possibly, but by no means
definitively, Walthamstow Town Hall. This was an interesting period
pianistically for the conductor. Earlier in the year he’d set down Rachmaninov,
Tchaikovsky and Bach with Peter Katin, Litolff with Curzon, and immediately
after the Katz sessions he went on to tape Dohnányi with Katchen
and Mozart with Annie Fischer. In between came the small matter of symphonies
by Mahler, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Vaughan Williams’ Job and a series
with Alfredo Campoli.
Katz was thirty-three when he made these recordings.
Rumanian born he was taught by Lipatti’s teacher Florica Musicescu and
he evinces a really splendid control over the architecture of these
two works that in lesser hands, the Khachaturian especially, can descend
perilously close to bombast. In the Prokofiev he is partnered by Boult
in a forceful and active contribution and by the LPO in good, occasionally
slightly tentative, form. The glockenspiel and rasp of the brass ring
out, as do Katz’s effortless but musically convincing runs and his chordal
sophistication. In the Khachaturian he manages to find – critics would
aver salvages – delicacy and effervescence in the Allegro first movement
and manages to integrate the raucous, brash patina with moments of depth.
There is strength but also poetry from him as well in the Andante taken
properly, as the marking dictates, con anima. If you are going
to insinuate a flexatone into an orchestral score I suppose it had better
been done as here, with a sense of almost exotic apartness. And the
spirited, trumpet-led conclusion rings out well – drama and colour aplenty,
and finding soloist, orchestra and conductor in close, musically rewarding
accord.
As a bonus there are some solo pieces, three of the
Tales of the Old Grandmother and the Prelude in C major, by Prokofiev,
and by Khachaturian’s glittering Toccata. Evocative and excellently
dispatched, the third of the Tales, becomes very seriously compromised
by wow at 2.50. Otherwise this is a welcome reminder of Katz’s conspicuously
superior talent.
Jonathan Woolf