Dohnányi: Violin Sonata, Rhapsodies and Piano Concerto

Ghosts have a way of turning up on Pristine’s release schedule, and this one arrives trailing more than the usual dust. Ernst von Dohnányi at the keyboard, playing his own music, is not a novelty — he made a specialty of it well into old age, dragging his rich Brahmsian language across two continents and several political catastrophes he never quite managed to outrun. But hearing him here, in 1951 and 1952, close to the end, with a violinist who was himself packing up his career: that has a poignancy no amount of hiss-reduction software can scrub away.

Start with the sonata, since that is the real news. The Violin Sonata in C sharp minor, op. 21, waited on a shelf for over a quarter-century before Varèse Sarabande finally let it out in 1978, and even now it has never quite escaped the margins of the catalog. Albert Spalding was seventy, done with the concert stage, not long for the world. He died in 1953. It shows. Intonation slips in the upper reaches of the first movement, the tone thins to something almost papery at the top of the E string, and there are patches in the finale where Dohnányi’s fiendish keyboard writing simply outruns him. No one would mistake this for prime Spalding, the elegant, patrician violinist who premiered Barber’s concerto and represented American string playing at its most cultivated between the wars.

There is something in the phrasing — a nobility, an unforced Romantic sweep, especially in those long portamento slides that a later generation of violinists would consider bad manners — that tells you exactly how this music wants to breathe. Dohnányi is right there beside him, not accompanying so much as co-authoring, and the outer sections of the finale have real drive, a kind of aristocratic urgency. Ricci recorded this sonata with more security. Shumsky too. Thomas Matthews, on Australian Columbia 78s from roughly the same era, may even be the more accomplished fiddler technically. None of them had the composer at the piano. That counts for something, indeed it counts for quite a lot, if you care (as I do) about the difference between a score’s instructions and a composer’s private sense of tempo, rubato, weight.

The Four Rhapsodies, op. 11, fare better, if only because Dohnányi has no one to cover for and nothing to prove. These come from a 1951 Remington LP, likewise never transferred to CD before now, and the piano writing is extravagant, unapologetically pianistic in that turn-of-the-century way: Liszt filtered through Brahms, with detours into something almost Mussorgskian in the bruising chordal writing of the C major. The G minor rhapsody has an old man’s fire in it, heroic without bombast. Sound quality wobbles — tape stretch, some flutter, a general sense of sonic fragility — but Dohnányi’s hands don’t wobble at all. The Dies Irae quotation stalking through the final E flat minor rhapsody lands with real weight, a memento mori from a composer who by 1951 had buried most of the world he was born into.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in B minor, op. 42, is the odd one out here: later, glossier, recorded in proper stereo from an Angel source, with Adrian Boult and the Royal Philharmonic providing a professional, faintly anonymous accompaniment. Boult was never a specialist in this repertoire and it shows in a certain four-square correctness, though the orchestra plays with good tone throughout. The concerto itself is unabashedly retrospective. A March theme launches the first movement with an urgency that owes as much to Brahms and Rachmaninov as to Liszt, and Dohnányi, by 1946–47 an exile from Hungary living under a cloud of unproven wartime accusations, seems to be writing his way back into a world that had largely stopped listening. The rendition is more comfortable than incendiary. Dohnányi’s own fingers had lost a little of the old dash by then. But it is idiomatic in ways that no outside interpreter, however gifted, could quite duplicate.

Pristine’s restoration work is, as usual, more diplomatic than miraculous. The source material has real limitations that no amount of careful noise-shaping can fully erase, particularly in the Remington originals. But limitations aside, this disc belongs on the shelf of anyone who cares about Dohnányi as composer-pianist, that increasingly rare breed who understood his own music from the inside, fingertips first. The sonata is the reason to buy it. The rest is why you’ll keep coming back.