Leimer and Rachmaninov Piano Concertos – Kurt Leimer

Some names survive as footnotes to other people’s careers, and Kurt Leimer has spent decades as one of them — the pianist Stokowski once bothered to conduct, the composer whose scores read like fan mail to Rachmaninov. Colosseum Classics keeps digging him up. This latest disc is the argument for the defense, and it is more persuasive than I expected it to be.

The Piano Concerto No. 2, which Leimer called Music for Piano and Orchestra, dates from the years just after the war, and it wears its influences the way a young man wears his father’s coat: proudly, a little too large, sleeves rolled up. The slow movement drifts into a ghostly waltz that could have wandered out of Prokofiev’s pocket. The finale can’t decide whether it wants to be Gershwin at the Savoy or Rachmaninov at Ivanovka, so it does both, brashly, and mostly gets away with it. Leimer’s themes have genuine melodic thrust — they don’t just gesture at grandeur, they earn a little of it — and the orchestration doesn’t try to out-shout the piano.

What makes the performance a document rather than a curiosity is Stokowski. Lugano, 1968: the old wizard was eighty-six, still conducting from memory, still capable of pulling a sound out of an orchestra that had no business existing in a studio broadcast from Italian-speaking Switzerland. The Orchestra della Radio della Svizzera Italiana was not the Philadelphia strings he’d spent a career burnishing, but you can hear him coaxing something plush and dark out of the middle register anyway, especially under the piano’s octave writing in the first movement. Why he agreed to do this piece, for this pianist, in this backwater of the broadcasting world, is one of those mysteries the biographies don’t solve. Maybe he simply liked being surprised. He spent his last two decades chasing repertoire nobody expected him to touch — Ives, Shostakovich, obscure Rachmaninov transcriptions — and a homage-concerto by a pianist-composer with more chutzpah than shame fits the pattern rather nicely.

Then, without much warning, Leimer pivots into the real thing.

The “Prelude in G minor,” op. 23 No. 5, comes first, a stiff-backed little curtain-raiser, martial in its outer sections and swooning in its center. Leimer plays the central episode with a rubato that stretches close to indulgence but never quite snaps. Then the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, op. 30, arrives in its heavily cut form, the version pianists reached for in the 78 era and sometimes well beyond it when nerve or rehearsal time ran short. Horowitz eventually persuaded the world it should be played uncut and unafraid; before him, and alongside him for a good while, the shortened text was simply how the piece traveled.

Leimer’s account has genuine idiomatic instinct — the hand knows this language, knows where the melodic line wants to breathe and where the figuration is meant to blur rather than clarify. Technically he’s assured without being flashy about it; there’s none of the exhibitionism some pianists bring to this score, as if the difficulty itself were the point. The Nuremberg Symphony under Zsolt Deáky, though, is a problem. Recorded thin, pushed to the back of the balance, the orchestra offers accompaniment rather than partnership. The horn entries in the slow movement barely register; the climaxes in the finale sound boxed in, airless. Deáky did similar duty for Elly Ney with this same orchestra not long after, and he was a capable house director of the kind smaller German labels relied on constantly in these years. But capable is not inspired, and this interpretation never once threatens to compete with Rachmaninov’s own 1939–40 recording, let alone with Horowitz and Reiner, or Argerich’s live incandescence decades later.

So: a disc of unequal parts. The Leimer concerto is the real discovery, worth hearing twice for its cheerful nerve alone, and worth hearing a third time for what Stokowski does with it. The Rachmaninov is respectable, sometimes touching, ultimately overshadowed — by history, by rival recordings, by its own truncation. Collectors of Stokowski’s stranger byways should not hesitate. Everyone else can wait for the concerto to turn up on its own, without the padding.