Rachmaninov and Brahms – Van Cliburn in Moscow

There is something almost unbearably poignant about hearing Van Cliburn play for the Russians again, fourteen years on from the triumph that made him a Cold War talisman whether he wanted the job or not. By 1972 the boy from Kilgore, Texas, was a middle-aged man carrying the weight of an entire diplomatic mythology on his shoulders. You can hear it. The freedom in this playing has a hard-won quality, not the untroubled ardor of the 1958 competition tapes but something tempered, heavier, sadder around the edges.

The Rachmaninov comes from studio sessions, and the studio has not been kind to it. RCA’s engineers, or perhaps just the limitations of Soviet equipment at Melodiya’s disposal, gave us a piano sound that’s bright to the point of glare, clangorous in the fortissimo variations, with the orchestra shoved back into a recess where Kondrashin’s contribution registers more as rumor than substance. This is a pity, because what little we can discern of the Moscow Philharmonic’s playing suggests real sympathy, real give-and-take. Kondrashin knew this repertoire from the inside; he’d have breathed with Cliburn instinctively, the way conductors sometimes do with soloists they respect rather than merely accompany.

None of which stops the rendition from being thrilling. Cliburn’s octaves in the early variations have a leonine snap, and he plays the demonic Variation VII, that grim little Dies Irae quotation, with real weight in the bass, not just splashy energy. The famous eighteenth variation, the Big Tune every arranger since 1934 has wanted to steal for a movie score, he shapes with a long, unhurried line, rubato applied like a watercolor wash rather than poured from a bucket. No wallow, no syrup. It breathes. But the constricted, slightly distorted sonics rob the climax of the amplitude it needs. You sense the size of what should be happening rather than feeling it in your chest, which is a real loss in a work whose whole architecture depends on that final surge of triumph.

The Brahms is another matter entirely, and a considerably more interesting document.

Recorded live in the same hall, the old Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, with its notoriously live acoustic and, on this evidence, an audience that breathed audibly and occasionally shifted in creaky seats, the concerto emerges in far more truthful, unforced sound. Odd, that. A studio session sounding worse than a broadcast tape. But there it is: the piano and orchestra occupy the same sonic space here, argue with each other as they should in this most symphonic of piano concertos, the one Brahms himself joked was “a tiny, tiny piano concerto with a tiny, tiny scherzo.”

Cliburn’s first movement has grandeur without bombast, the opening horn call answered by rolling piano arpeggios that never rush, never grab. He has the strength for the massive chordal writing (this is, after all, a work that nearly killed lesser pianists’ hands) but he also has the patience for Brahms’s long-breathed lyricism, the autumnal glow that separates this concerto from the stormier First. The scherzo has bite and real demonic energy, Kondrashin’s strings dig in hard, sul ponticello edge audible in places, and then that slow movement, with its heartbreaking cello solo, unfolds at a tempo that feels inevitable rather than chosen. Whoever led the Moscow Philharmonic’s cellos that night deserves a footnote in the discography; the tone is dark, covered, almost baritonal, exactly what this music wants.

Does it unseat Backhaus with Böhm, or Gilels with Jochum, still the aristocratic standard for this work, or Curzon’s autumnal late traversal? No. Cliburn’s Brahms, for all its sincerity, occasionally wants for the last ounce of structural inevitability that those pianists brought, a sense of the whole architecture mapped out in advance. There are moments, particularly in the finale, where the playing turns discursive, incidental beauties accumulating without quite cohering into an argument. But as a document of a particular pianist, a particular political moment, a particular hall with its particular resonance and its coughing patrons, this has few rivals. History clings to this disc like rosin dust on a bow.

Sound restoration on the Presto reissue does what it can with source tapes that were never going to yield studio-quality results. Hiss is present but not intrusive, and dynamic range, especially in the Brahms, is more generous than I expected going in. Recommended, with the caveat that you come to it for the story as much as the sonics, though in the case of the Brahms concerto, the music-making alone justifies the price of admission.