Arensky was twenty when he wrote his concerto
while still a student at the St Petersburg Conservatory, and its mix
of Chopin and Tchaikovsky is evident from the start. He was a pupil
of Rimsky-Korsakov though he does not achieve that composer’s skill
in orchestration, but then these works are very much vehicles for the
piano to shine, with a tendency to hover on the borders of salon music
in places. The concerto’s slow movement produces those florid and typically
Chopinesque cascades against a lyrical string melody, while the finale
(very similar to the famous portentous start of Grieg’s piano concerto)
apparently earned a rebuke from Tchaikovsky for being in 5/4 time, strangely
so for later on his own Pathétique Symphony would include
a whole movement in that quirky time signature. Horowitz played the
concerto much when he was starting out, using it effectively to show
off his virtuosity. There’s a nice little filler in the attractive Fantasy
written in 1899 but the best of this attractive disc lies in the concerto
by the virtually unknown Bortkiewicz.
Sergei Bortkiewicz was not in the same virtuoso
league as many other pianist/composers of his day but managed a living
as a teacher and composer, mainly in Vienna from 1922 after leaving
his native Russia because of the Bolshevik revolution. In his own words
he was ‘a Romantic and a melodist’ with a distaste for ‘so-called modern,
atonal and cacophonic music’, so Vienna was hardly a good choice of
domicile considering that for about ten or fifteen years he was rubbing
shoulders with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. This concerto (this is the
first complete recording after Marjorie Mitchell’s cut version for the
Brunswick label back in the 1960s) has an awful lot going for it, lush
tunes (very Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky), rich tonal colours,
highly romantic music (and there are apparently two further concertos)
in the best sense of the word. The finale is excitingly Russian in its
rhythms and dance-like idiom.
Stephen Coombs plays these works for all they are worth,
the only way they can be done, full-blooded in his committed approach,
while the BBCSSO under their erstwhile Music Director give full support.
Given Hyperion’s brief for this series, the concerto by Bortkiewicz
fits the bill perfectly. You cannot get more Romantic than this brief
encounter.
Christopher Fifield
Hyperion
Romantic Piano Concerto Series
Stephen Coombs (piano)