Rubinstein: Don Quixote and Ivan IV – Golovchin

History has been unkind to Anton Rubinstein in a particularly cruel way: it has confused him with his younger brother, and then, having sorted that out, forgotten him anyway. He was, in his day, one of the towering pianists of the nineteenth century, a rival to Liszt at the keyboard, the founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the teacher who gave Tchaikovsky his grounding in craft. He wrote prodigiously — operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, a pile of it — and almost none of it has stuck. There’s a lesson somewhere in that, about fluency versus voice. Rubinstein himself never quite metabolized it.

These two “musical pictures,” as he called them (the term itself tells you he was avoiding the more fashionable Lisztian tag of symphonic poem, perhaps out of some residual conservatism, perhaps just contrarian branding), come from the late 1860s, when the battle lines between the Mighty Handful and the conservatory-trained “Germanic” composers were hardening. Rubinstein sat squarely on the wrong side of that battle, at least as history has scored it. Balakirev and company were out digging up modal folk tunes and orientalist color. Rubinstein kept his ears fixed on Mendelssohn, on Schumann, on the example of Liszt’s orchestral experiments without ever fully absorbing Liszt’s structural daring.

Don Quixote suffers for it. The opening pages are genuinely arresting: dark, minor-mode, full of gravelly lower-string tremolando that promises something weightier than what follows. But the piece quickly disintegrates into a string of episodes, a windmill skirmish here, a bit of pastoral wandering there, that never accumulate into an argument. Tchaikovsky, who knew a thing or two about programmatic writing, called it “very interesting and well done” but noted its resemblance to ballet-pantomime music, and damn if he wasn’t right. You can practically see the mime artists gesturing along. Golovchin and the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia play it with evident commitment. The winds have a nice reedy, slightly acidic tang that suits the Cervantic comedy, but no maestro alive could weld these seams into a symphonic whole, because the seams are built into the material.

Ivan IV is the more interesting piece, oddly enough, precisely because it aims lower. Rubinstein isn’t narrating a chronicle; he’s sketching a temperament — brooding, mercurial, capable of tenderness and savagery within the same paragraph. That’s about as accurate a summary of Ivan the Terrible as nineteenth-century Russia was prepared to offer up in polite orchestral company. The brass writing has real menace, thick and covered, almost muffled, like something glimpsed through smoke. There’s a modal turn or two that briefly suggests Rubinstein eavesdropping on his nationalist rivals despite himself. It hangs together better than the Quixote, if only because a character study permits more latitude than an episodic narrative demands cohesion it never delivers.

Golovchin’s orchestra is not the Berlin Philharmonic, and nobody buying this disc should expect Karajan-caliber sheen. The string tone thins out uncomfortably at climaxes. I noted a few moments, particularly in the brass fanfares of Ivan IV, where ensemble precision goes slightly soft around the edges, as though the parts hadn’t been under the fingers terribly long. But there’s a rough-hewn conviction to the playing that suits this repertoire better than glossy virtuosity would. This is music that wants blood and sawdust, not varnish.

Is there a great album of either work waiting in the wings, one that would make the case more persuasively? I doubt it. These are pieces of considerable historical interest and only intermittent artistic reward, worth hearing once, maybe twice, mostly to understand what the Mighty Handful was reacting against. Golovchin makes as good a case for them as anyone has bothered to in decades. That’s a modest recommendation, but not a dishonest one.