Naxos’s Weingartner
series continues very usefully on its
way with this Concerto disc. The Triple
Concerto is a discographic first, whereas
the C minor concerto had long been beaten
by the very late acoustic recorded by
the Australian William Murdoch with
the Hallé (sheltering under the
soubriquet of ‘An Orchestra’ for diverse
reasons) under Sir Hamilton Harty. For
the concerto Weingartner was paired
with the mercurial Marguerite Long.
The opening is brisk, rhythmically crisp
and incisively full of momentum. The
piano is up-front in the recorded perspective
and we can savour her capricious phrasing
and rallentandi, with Weingartner encouraging
some pliant string moulding and warmly
yielding tone. There is a sense of real
dialogue between soloist and orchestra
even though there are moments when left-hand
detail is submerged. Certainly there
is something of a studied quality to
some of Long’s playing, quite choppy
as well, but against that she does make
explicit the harmonic implications in
a most keen and unusual way. She plays
the Moscheles cadenza. The slow movement
is warm and songful but a bit strait-laced
and with some superficial sounding passagework
whilst the finale is deft if again rather
strict, except for an idiosyncratic
caesura. The copies derive from French
Columbia laminates and are rather noisy
but the ear adjusts quickly.
The Triple Concerto
features three youthful contemporaries;
Ricardo Odnoposoff, Flesch student and
Ysaÿe Competition prize winner,
cellist Stefan Auber who was later to
become a member of the Kolisch Quartet
and pianist Angelica Morales, Mexican-born,
a Petri student and one of Emil von
Sauer’s wives (she’d also studied with
him). Auber bears the brunt of difficulty
in this work, maintaining a good legato
and coping with the notorious demands
with admirable sang froid, even if his
tone can incline to insistence now and
then. His colleagues prove good foils,
Morales especially, and Weingartner
corrals things with practised wit. Copies
and transfer are fine.
There are competing
versions of these famous recordings,
of course. Andante, for example has
a Beethoven Concertos set, of which
the Marguerite Long forms a part, and
Pearl has released the Triple coupled
with the Weingartner Hammerklavier orchestration.
But the former is part of a set and
thus unwieldy, perhaps, for those most
concerned with Weingartner. So a warm
welcome to the latest in this instructive
series from Naxos.
Jonathan Woolf
Ricardo Odnoposoff (violin) 