Customer Reviews

Khachaturian - Piano Concerto in D Flat Major, Symphony No. 3 in C Major - Kondrashin

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I first became acquainted with little known Russian pianist Yakov Flier via a vinyl LP of his really compelling performance of the Brahms first piano concerto. I don't think that recording, also caught in stereo, was ever release on red book CD. More's the pity. If only Flier had traveled to give concerts in the west, and been signed onto a big name label that could have given him the exposure that clued us in, to Ashkenazy, Gilels, Richter, or Berman? Grabbing this disc while it was still available came on fast, a no brainer. I never had any inkling that this Khachaturian piano concerto tape existed, so now I am wondering what else from Flier might still be sitting around, somewhere in the mystery Russian vaults?

For now, it will have to do, to just sit back and enjoy Flier in this sizzling, virtuoso reading of the piano concerto from the Armenian composer, who is damned with faint praise if he gets praised at all. Khachaturian is a bit of a secret, guilty pleasure; his reputation grown self-immolating in a reputation for surface Armenian folk gloss, glitzy - probably viewed as kitsch, at best, in some quarters. But, I already have the Mindru Katz reading under Sir Adrian Boult; and I think sometimes a performer can make a convincing case for the concerto as decent-enough music from the early part of the past century. Next to Katz on the keeper shelf is Boris Berezovsky, and next to him is Jablonski who does just about as much as any pianist can, to put the concerto across on musical terms. Dickran Atamian has also give us a fiery, intense disc; but knowing how well Flier did with that Brahms concerto, way back when, was incentive enough for curiosity to kick in.

The Moscow Philharmonic under Kondrashin is more or less its usual self as westerners have come to know it on recordings - vigorous if not at times, brash; able to play in tune; a slapdash but Slavic way with rhythms and melodies that does get the musical point across, even if we cannot expect deep-velvety tonal values or that constant sheen of brute instrumental polish that arrives regularly from, say, Vienna, Berlin, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

Technically, Yakov Flier is square in the middle of the long-standing Russian piano virtuoso traditions, reaching back to at least the Rubenstein brothers? No matter what the challenge, Flier can handle it with utter confidence and fluency - octaves, runs, knuckle-breaking chords, coaxing zingy colors out of the notes, fast and slow. To his great musical credit, Flier does not try to make the Khachaturian into anything more than it is; playing angled just right, as USA virtuoso Earl Wild was able to do with Paderewski, Scharwenka, Moszkowski, or d'Albert.

Okay I will confess that the third symphony still sounds a bit iffy to me ... long on trumpet fanfares, big orchestra outbursts, organ busy flying its considerable flags on all the ramparts - with less depth and substance than even the composer's second symphony. My keeper for this third has long been Stokowski in Chicago; but that does not mean I think he got much more out of it than Kondrashin does here; ... except of course that Chicago was a more remarkable band, and the USA engineers for RCA gave it better stereo sound. I figure the best we can do with the third symphony is to give it its muscle-bound head, all wide-angle cinema around the shoulders and torso, framing that sinuous, exotic Armenian-Slavic melody.

In this reading, the symphony runs about 25 minutes; and it is typical that it comes across as a sort of really big tone poem with a plethora of symphonic gestures, if not with much formal rigor of musical intellect. No complicated variations or development, no fugues there. Yakov Flier is the real five stars deal, however; sufficient enough to renew hope that those unknown vaults might give us more of him in decent, stereo sound?