Rubinstein Piano Concertos – Alexander Paley

Everyone knows Rubinstein’s misfortune — to share a surname with a much greater pianist born sixty years later, and to write music that sounds, at its best moments, like Mendelssohn drinking too much vodka with Liszt. History has not been kind. But history is often lazy, and this reissue, dug up from an obscure Russian Disc release of 1993 and now wearing a Delos label it never earned honestly, makes a decent case for rehabilitation — at least partial.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major is the real discovery here, if discovery is the word for something written in 1851 and essentially unheard since. Alexander Paley plays it as though he believes in it, which counts for a great deal in this repertoire. Belief is not something you can fake through the fingers alone, though heaven knows pianists try. The slow movement has that particular Russian melancholy that isn’t quite melancholy, more a kind of expansive brooding, full of rolled chords and long-limbed melodic paragraphs that Paley shapes with real sensitivity to breath and silence. He resists the urge to rush the soliloquies. Good. This music needs air.

The finale goes with real bravura. No draggy moderato here, thank goodness — the curse that sank Joseph Banowetz’s earlier Marco Polo account of the same score into a kind of well-mannered torpor. Paley and Golovchin let it fly. There’s a nonchalance to the virtuosity, an offhandedness, that suits Rubinstein’s slightly garrulous invention far better than reverence would.

The Fourth Concerto, in D minor, is another matter, and a trickier one. This is the piece with the pedigree: Anton Rubinstein’s own touring warhorse, championed later by everyone from Josef Hofmann to Van Cliburn, a work that briefly, in the late nineteenth century, rivaled Tchaikovsky’s First for popularity on two continents. It hasn’t the same tunes, but it has genuine architectural ambition, and moments — that dusky opening idea, the martial exchanges in the finale — of real authority.

Paley’s account is thoughtful, sometimes to a fault. He leans into the work’s introspective side, and there are stretches, the slow movement especially, where lyricism tips over into something closer to stasis, playing that admires its own sensitivity a beat too long. I understand the impulse. But this concerto wants blood too, some old-fashioned physical recklessness, and for that you must go elsewhere.

Elsewhere means, above all, Josef Hofmann: the live broadcasts with Reiner and with Karl Krueger, both preserved, in sound that ranges from acceptable to frankly rough, on the indispensable Marston two-disc Hofmann survey. Those performances come from a vanished world of pianism, one in which technical command and expressive abandon were not opposing values but the same value seen from two angles. Oscar Levant’s old disc with Mitropoulos has the same electricity, unruly and thrilling in about equal measure. Set beside those, today’s players, Paley included, and I say this with real affection for what he achieves, sound a touch domesticated. Raymond Lewenthal’s version, when EMI or whoever currently owns it deigns to keep it in print, splits the difference rather beautifully: patrician but not tame.

None of which should discourage anyone from seeking this disc out. Golovchin, who has made something of a specialty of Rubinstein’s orchestral scores, provides sturdy, idiomatic support throughout. The State Symphony Orchestra of Russia plays with more polish than glamour but never gets in the way. The engineering, for 1993, holds up fine: woodwinds a little recessed, brass with a pleasing rasp when called on.

Recommended, then, chiefly for the Second Concerto, which you will not easily find played with this much conviction anywhere else. And recommended with reservations, but real ones, for the Fourth, where Paley’s intelligence occasionally gets the better of his nerve.