Dvořák: Piano Concerto; Violin Concerto; Cello Concerto
Rudolf Firkušný, piano; Ruggiero Ricci, violin; Zara Nelsova, cello; Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; Walter Susskind, conductor.
Brilliant Classics 99763. Recorded early-to-mid 1970s. 2 CDs.
Walter Susskind. The name deserves more than the footnote history has assigned it. Born in Prague in 1913, trained in that dense Austro-Czech lineage—Josef Suk for composition, George Szell for piano—he carried a tradition in his bones that most conductors of his generation could only approximate intellectually. These Vox recordings, licensed here by Brilliant Classics without so much as a recording date between them (almost certainly early-to-mid seventies, if you’re listening), remind us what we lost when that tradition thinned out.
No liner notes about the performers. A typo on the box. Par for the budget-label course.
None of it matters, because what’s inside these two discs is something worth sitting with.
The Cello Concerto
Start with Nelsova, because this is where the set announces its intentions most clearly. Zara Nelsova—Canadian, Barbirolli-trained, shaped by years of chamber work alongside Ernest MacMillan and Kathleen Parlow—brings to Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor a quality you don’t often encounter: architectural patience. She knows where the piece is going. More to the point, she trusts it to get there without her pushing.
Susskind’s opening tutti sets the tone immediately. Lean. Taut. The St. Louis strings have a focused, somewhat spare quality—not lush in the Philadelphia manner—and Susskind exploits this, building incipient tension through phrasing that pulls rather than pushes. When Nelsova enters, her articulation is precise, almost severe, and yes, some of the staccato work will strike listeners raised on Rostropovich as willfully understated. But listen—really listen—to what Susskind has done with the string coloring in the tutti just before her entry in that first movement’s desolate passage, where the flute’s ghostly counter-theme hovers overhead. He’s prepared the ground. The drama arrives not because anyone forced it but because the music was pointed there all along.
The slow movement is where Nelsova’s chamber instincts take over completely. The rise and fall of her rubato here has an intimacy that’s almost conversational—she’s not performing the melody so much as thinking through it. There’s a moment around 7:50 where the phrasing feels just slightly metronomic, a touch short on inflection, but she’s holding something back deliberately, and at 8:04 the transitional passage receives rubato of such perfectly judged restraint that you understand the strategy. She was saving it.
If Rostropovich and Karajan is your benchmark—all that opulent, heart-on-sleeve voltage—Nelsova will seem cool to you. That’s your problem, frankly, not hers. The finale’s scurrying passages are as Czech as anything I’ve heard from a non-Czech ensemble, and the reminiscence of the slow movement arrives with none of the self-indulgence that capsizes so many otherwise distinguished accounts. No easy gestures. The skeletal material of the music remains audible throughout. Nelsova and Susskind won’t displace Casals and Szell, or Rostropovich with Boult and Talich—those are irreplaceable for different reasons—but this performance illuminates the work’s architecture with a clarity that’s genuinely rare.
The Piano Concerto
Firkušný had already recorded Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in G Minor twice before these sessions, and it shows—not in any sense of routine, but in the ease with which he navigates the work’s genuine awkwardness. The textual situation here is moderately murky: Firkušný studied with Vilém Kurz, whose edition appears in the complete Dvořák, but by this point the pianist had moved toward a more hybrid text, leaning increasingly toward Dvořák’s own intentions over Kurz’s considerable interventions.
The Brahmsian weight of the first movement never becomes a liability in his hands. The passagework is limpid and triumphant—Horowitz admired Firkušný, and you can hear why, even if the two pianists were temperamentally quite different—and Susskind’s orchestra responds with a sheen and attentiveness that’s genuinely impressive. At around 10:50, the trumpets blaze in with a strutting authority, dynamics finely calibrated, that lifts the whole central section. Firkušný’s cadenza has seemingly limitless finesse: lines brought out, architectural integrity maintained, virtuosity entirely in service of the argument rather than displayed for its own sake.
The slow movement is simply radiant. Those treble lines—clear as cold water, limpid in a way that makes you genuinely despair of hearing them matched—are controlled by an underlying momentum that never lets sentiment curdle into sentimentality. And the finale, so often derided as merely difficult passagework strung together, comes alive in his hands as something reflective and genuinely fascinating. Closely related thematically to the second of the op. 45 Slavonic Rhapsodies, it’s a real Czech dance at heart, and Firkušný and Susskind drive it to a conclusion of heroic, unforced brio.
This is the finest release of this concerto I know. I’m aware that’s a strong claim.
The Violin Concerto
Ricci is another matter. His performance of the Violin Concerto in A Minor is febrile and coiled—characteristically so—and there are moments, particularly in the folk-inflected passages of the finale from around 4:15 onward, where his intensity serves the music beautifully. Susskind builds a real head of steam in that finale, and Ricci rides it with genuine élan.
But elsewhere the problems accumulate. The first-movement passagework is sometimes brusque to the point of bluntness, the phrasing occasionally prosaic in ways that feel careless rather than deliberately plain. His vibrato—powerfully individual, no question—oscillates too violently
