DownWithTyranny!: Sunday Classics: Mastering the fine art of Edvard Grieg

Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982),
at about the time of our recording

by Ken

As I explained last night, we've circled back to spend some more time with Grieg's wonderful little Lyric Pieces. On our first visit I picked out a few pieces I'm particularly fond of, and we heard those along with one complete "book," the six pieces of Op. 54 (Book V of the ten), which happens also -- by sheerest coincidence, of course -- to be the set Grieg participated in orchestrating almost all of. (We also heard all five orchestral versions, including the four that form into the orchestral Lyric Suite, which we also heard.)

For performances of the original piano versions, I depended primarily on the beautiful complete recording made by the English pianist Peter Katin for Unicorn-Kanchana in the final days of 1989. However, I threw in two performances by the great Arthur Rubinstein, which I happened to have because they had been plunked onto a CD in the "RCA Victor Basic 100" series, in between Rubinstein's 1961 recording of the Grieg A minor Concerto with Alfred Wallenstein and his 1967 recording of the Schumann Concerto with Carlo Maria Giulini.

I guessed that those Lyric Pieces, "Shepherd Boy" and the ever-popular "Trolls' March" (also known as the "March of the Dwarves") were from Rubinstein's 1953 all-Grieg LP, which constitutes the whole of the pianist's solo Grieg discography. To give you a glimmer of how these posts play into and out of my musical preoccupations, I was so taken with those two Rubinstein Lyric Pieces that I became really curious about the rest of that Grieg LP. It turns out that all of it was dumped onto a CD, along with Rubinstein's first recording of the Grieg Piano Concerto -- from 1942, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra -- as Vol. 13 of BMG's grand Rubinstein Collection, and reasonably priced copies aren't hard to find. So naturally I ordered it.

When it arrived, I was delighted to discover that the notes for this volume are by my friend Harris Goldsmith. I still haven't seen by any means all the volumes of the Rubinstein Collection, but even in the limited space allotted for liner notes, the gap between Harris's notes and even the best of the other writers engaged for the project is enormous. (As to the worst of them . . . no, let's not go there.)

Here, for example, is what Harris has to say about that 1942 recording of the Piano Concerto: "A comparison . . . with the subsequent versions reveals an attractive dramatic freshness and vitality that over the years eased into ever-increasing lyricism and expansiveness." Of course if he'd been given the space, Harris could have provided a detailed comparison of the Rubinstein Grieg Concerto recordings that would have left us filled with new insight into Rubinstein as an artist and the expressive possibilities built into the piece, but for one sentence that's pretty darned good, and I wish I'd had it to offer when we heard three of Rubinstein's four audio recordings (the 1942, 1949, and 1961) and saw the finale of the 1975 video recording.

Since the BMG transfer really does sound better than the one I used (from an Ormandy anthology), with more believably musical textures, why don't we listen to the performance again?

GRIEG: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16

i. Allegro molto moderato

[By the way, don't ask me what exactly Grieg means by that tempo marking. The "molto" would normally be taken as an exhortation to really jack up the "allegro," so about the last thing you'd expect here is a moderating "moderato." The idea appears to be a not-all-that-molto allegro.]

ii. Adagio

followed without pause by:

iii. Allegro moderato molto e marcato; Quasi presto; Andante maestoso

[Here, you'll note, we've got "moderato" and "molto" reversed, which is even less clear to me.]

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded 1942

At this point feel free to go back and listen to the other Rubinstein Grieg Concerto recordings (here's the link again), in particular the beautiful 1961 one that he declared himself so pleased with.

RETURNING TO THE LYRIC PIECES

By the time Rubinstein made his second recording of the Grieg Concerto, with Antal Dorati in 1949, as Harris suggests, the evolution in this piece from "dramatic freshness and vitality" to "ever-increasing lyricism and expansiveness" was already in progress. The 1953 solo Grieg LP, however, harks back to the earlier style. As Harris notes, the Lyric Pieces and the rest are "rendered with a sophistication and lack of artifice (which are quintessential Rubinstein) and with a sec clarity (atypical of the well-loved artist's more copiously pedaled work at actual concerts)."

"Sec" rather than "dry," you'll note, because "dry" has connotations of aridity, where "sec" may suggest something more like bracingly crisp. Listen, for example, to Rubinstein play the rippling runs in "Papillon," as compared with all our other pianists.

What we're going to do now is pretty straightforward: go through the 11 Lyric Pieces Rubinstein recorded, in the order they appear on the CD, which I'm assuming is carried over from the LP (which I don't have) and therefore represents a sequence that if not planned by was at least approved by the artist, played first by Rubinstein, then by Peter Katin (whose performances, as I've said, hold up amazingly well -- you don't get blinding insight, but you do get beautiful sound, animated rhythm, and an unfailingly sound sense of proportion), and then in some cases by one or more "guest artists." To maintain the sequence, I've folded in the two pieces we already heard in the Katin and Rubinstein performances.

I should add that Rubinstein has the advantage of playing on "home field"; these are the pieces he chose, and he undoubtedly chose them for good reasons. I should also say that I'm not a fanatical Lyric Pieces collector, and I'm in no position to offer these as the best or most interesting performances. These are performances I either had or had access to, which illustrate basic performance issues in this music.

"At the Cradle," Book IX (Op. 68), No. 5

Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA/BMG, recorded 1953