Leslie Howard - Rubinstein: Complete Piano Sonatas '1996

Tracks list

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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