Leslie Howard - Rubinstein: Complete Piano Sonatas (1996)

Tracklist

CD1
01. Piano Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 12: I. Allegro appassionato
02. Piano Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 12: II. Andante largamente
03. Piano Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 12: III. Moderato
04. Piano Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 12: IV. Moderato con fuoco
05. Piano Sonata No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 20: I. Allegro con moto
06. Piano Sonata No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 20: II. Andante. Tema – Variations 1-4
07. Piano Sonata No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 20: III. Vivace

CD2
01. Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Major, Op. 41: I. Allegro risoluto e con fuoco
02. Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Major, Op. 41: II. Allegretto con moto
03. Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Major, Op. 41: III. Andante
04. Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Major, Op. 41: IV. Allegro vivace
05. Piano Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 100: I. Moderato con moto
06. Piano Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 100: II. Allegro vivace
07. Piano Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 100: III. Andante
08. Piano Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 100: IV. Allegro assai

Nowadays there are a great many people who, upon encountering the name Rubinstein, would only think automatically of the Polish pianist, the late Artur Rubinstein. However, our subject (no relation) is the once world-renowned Russian composer and pianist Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein who was born in Balta Podalia (Ukraine) on 28 November 1829. He died in Peterhof on 20 November 1894.
In his lifetime, Anton Rubinstein was highly regarded as a pianist, as a conductor, as the first great Russian teacher whose methods and administration are still echoed in the modern Russian musical institutions, and as a prolific composer. Although he was certainly a conservative composer, he was also an influential one, and those who are lucky enough to unearth any of the once famous large-scale works can immediately see passages which were imitated by younger composers whose fame eventually eclipsed Rubinstein’s. Although the Romantic revival seems largely to have passed Rubinstein by—he is still recalled for a small handful of piano pieces and songs—there is always a case for reviving music which, in its time, was so well respected and which, in any case, is agreeable and well made.

Rubinstein’s own piano playing was one reason for the original success of his sonatas and concertos. He was, by general concensus, the greatest pianist since Liszt, and there are many accounts of performances which ranged from deeply sensitive to electrifying, though unfortunately he died just a little too early to leave us any recordings. His repertoire was enormous and all-embracing, and his most famous series of concerts was the cycle of seven Historical Recitals with which he toured Europe in 1885. These programmes began with early keyboard music of the English, French, Italian and German schools, moving through all the important Classical and early Romantic composers and ending with a selection of Russian piano music. Schumann and Chopin featured above all others. Only early music of Liszt appeared (Rubinstein felt that Liszt’s later forays into modern harmony were unacceptable) and Brahms was not featured at all (he loathed Brahms’s music, partly because Brahms had borrowed a great many ideas from him without acknowledgement, and had then written a great many unkind things about the very pieces by which he had been influenced).

Cutting himself off from both the conservative school of European music as exemplified by Brahms, and the modern school as exemplified by Liszt, Rubinstein left himself somewhat isolated as a composer, all the more so because he regarded all of his Russian forerunners as distinctly amateur. He mistrusted the growing school of Nationalism and took a very long time to appreciate that Tchaikovsky had any worth. He thought all along that real music died with Schumann and Chopin. Not surprisingly, then, he was a very conservative composer indeed. But this had its virtues. While the Russian school was emerging in something of a hit-or-miss fashion, Rubinstein, with his thorough German background, brought a great deal of order to chaos. He is revered in all books about Russian music for his abiding interest in rich, broad and highly competent musical education, and of course he will always be remembered for having founded the St Petersburg Conservatory. (His brother Nikolai, an equally old-fashioned academic well remembered for his criticisms of the early works of Tchaikovsky, was the director of the Moscow Conservatory.) Rubinstein believed that all potential Russian composers ought to be given better grounding in the essentials of musical language—up to this point the great Classical forms of European music, opera excluded, were almost non-existent in Russia.

Anton Rubinstein was Russian of German extraction, and Christian by virtue of his progenitors’ forcible conversion from Judaism. This admixture served his critics well, as Rubinstein himself admitted when he wrote of his being neither fish nor fowl: ‘For the Russians I am a German, for the Germans a Russian; for the Jews I am a Christian, for the Christians a Jew’ (Autobiography). But it was also the reason for his versatility and solid West-European cultural standards. He was certainly the first really professional Russian composer—precursors like Glinka and Dargomizhky were dilatory tinkers by comparison (at least in technical terms, even if they were more characteristically individual)—and set the example in standards of workmanship by a long, very even and, on the whole, attractive series of symphonies, concertos, sonatas, string quartets, songs, operas and oratorios. In between composing his vast output he travelled broadly, knew all the important musicians of his day, played the piano, had time to found and direct the St Petersburg Conservatory, and made for himself a place of unchallenged importance in the Russian musical life of the day.

It was Rubinstein who wrote the first significant body of Russian sonatas, concertos, symphonies and string quartets, and whose very industry and competence were an inspiration to composers like Tchaikovsky, who found the Nationalist school of Balakirev and his followers to be somewhat amateur and lacking in discipline.

Sadly, Russians did not appreciate his cosmopolitan music for long, and Western Europe criticized him for his sheer Mendelssohnian fluency. While there is justification for some of the criticism, and while it is certain that Rubinstein was no progressive, it is less than just that someone whose influence as a composer was so broad should have been so easily neglected. To mention but one example of his influence: the well-wrought and once-beloved Piano Concerto No 4 is obviously echoed in works as different as the first concerto of Tchaikovsky and the second of Brahms.

Of course, Rubinstein’s musical style shows the heavy influence of Mendelssohn and Schumann, but every now and then a little of Russia breaks through—for example in songs like Der Asra or ‘Gold rolls here before me’ (wonderfully recorded by Chaliapin), in the beautiful treatment of a folk song in the finale of the Piano Quartet, and in the explosive finale of the Piano Sonata No 1. The four piano sonatas are excellent representations of Rubinstein’s style and, for all the signs of derivation from time to time, they are forthright, effective, and often original pieces.

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