The Romantic Piano Concerto
     Vol. 5 - Balakirev & Rimsky-Korsakov

* Rimsky-Korsakov:
        Piano Concerto in c#, op. 30
* Balakirev:
        Piano Concerto No. 1 in f#, op. 1
        Piano Concerto No. 2 in Eb, op. posth.

Malcolm Binns (piano), English Northern Philharmonia/David Lloyd-Jones
Hyperion CDA66640 Total time:  60:30

Summary for the Busy Executive: Russian soul with sour cream.

Mili Balakirev has always struck me as a little son of a bitch - a bully,
a virulent anti-Semite, a narcissist - just the person I wouldn't want to
have dinner with.  Fortunately, he and I will never meet.  However, he must
have oozed charisma, and he could be generous.  In effect, he led three
geniuses and far better composers - Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and
Borodin - to find their artistic selves, even if they eventually had to
react against him.  Furthermore, he composed marvelous music in his own
right, although his output is small and punctuated by decades of silence.

Balakirev was an ideologue, a man with theories which he insisted upon.
On the one hand, this focused him.  On the other, some of these theories
almost wrecked him.  For Balakirev, "genuine" music had to express
spontaneously the state of one's soul.  Since souls apparently differed
by nationality, a Russian composer had to express his Russian soul.  He
insisted on avoiding academic training.  Of course a trained composer
doesn't necessarily mean a great one and vice versa.  On the other hand,
training can allow a composer to concentrate on what's really important
by letting him take for granted the 98% of composition that's dogwork and
giving him facility in certain basic skills.  The untrained composer you
usually find in one of two camps:  the composer who has to mentally argue
with himself over almost every note; the composer who can do nothing but
echo what he's already heard.  The amateur composer's output is usually
small and pastiche.  Significantly, of Balakirev's colleagues in the Mighty
Five, the composer with the most voluminous and varied catalogue is
Rimsky-Korsakov, the one who felt the lack of training most keenly and
(against Balakirev's advice - Balakirev was always free with his advice
and sulked when people didn't take it) actually returned to study and "do
his stodge."

Balakirev suffered from the ideas he held.  He endured long periods of
creative silence.  Indeed, his second piano concerto, begun in 1861, he
left unfinished at his death in 1910 (his friend Liapunov completed it).
However, he did avoid, for the most part, the trap of pastiche.  Almost
all of his output shows a very original musical mind.  His first piano
concerto - really a first movement only, a Konzertstueck - he composed in
his teens.  An impressive thirteen and a half minutes long, it points to
a writer capable of real power, and, although it derives to a very great
extent from Liszt and Schumann, many an older composer would have been
justifiably proud to have produced it.  The piano writing sounds full,
idiomatic, and virtuosic.  Its virtues are so many that its defects
surprise one all the more - mainly, that it lacks a completely convincing
narrative thrust.  At least twice during the movement's course, Balakirev
has to stop and start again.  Here, the architectural reach of Liszt or
Schumann, to say nothing of Brahms, eludes him.

Balakirev quickly left behind the obviously derivative idiom and indeed
gave this as the reason for never supplying the other movements.  He
preferred to start again, with the result that he produced one of the
finest concerti of the Romantic era.  As far as I can tell, just about
everyone who's heard this work wonders why pianists aren't lining up to
play it.  It's got just about everything:  wonderful themes, splendid
virtuosic writing, great orchestral color, moments to make you swoon or
drop your jaw.  The first movement has that bounding, soaring 3/4 quality
of Beethoven's "Eroica." Like Balakirev's first piano concerto, this
movement also lasts over thirteen minutes.  Here, however, the composer
doesn't run out of gas.  It interests me, however, that Balakirev builds
the movement just like academically-trained composers do.  He elaborates
and varies three thematic cells in what is essentially a slightly modified
sonata movement.  I have trouble imagining sonata form as a spontaneous
expression of the Russian soul, so there's probably something in the notion
of art as craft and, to some extent, as artifice.  The second movement
varies two themes.  The first, based on the Russian requiem liturgical
chant, seems rather unpromising for development:  it begins and ends on
the tonic (in c major or minor, for example, the tonic would be C; in D,
D is the tonic note), the most stable pitch of the scale.  Harmonically,
it usually doesn't lead to anything new, and one would get music which
merely repeated rather than developed.  The listener wouldn't sense a
journey through to somewhere.  Balakirev solves the problem both simply
and brilliantly.  I won't spoil the surprise by giving it away here.  The
second movement leads without pause to the finale by way of a very brief
passage based on the opening theme to the entire concerto.  It differs
from similar passages in Beethoven and Brahms in that it lacks structural
weight.  There's transition, but no sense of transformation from one thing
to another.  The effect is sort of like seeing a bird flit across the
periphery of vision.

The finale startled me by its similarity to the corresponding movement
in the Tchaikovsky B-flat concerto, down to the syncopations and thematic
shapes, as well as a similar dazzle in the fingerwork.  Tchaikovsky had
little regard for Balakirev's music or his person, and Balakirev
reciprocated the contempt.  The similarities might arise from the fact
that Balakirev never finished this movement, and Tchaikovsky came in
through Liapunov.  However, the bravura of Balakirev's piano writing was
in the composer's toolkit from the get-go, and Balakirev left plenty of
sketches and even played through an approximation of the movement for
Liapunov more than once.  Despite their mutual scorn, it may well be
that Tchaikovsky and Balakirev had more in common musically than either
realized.  In the final moments of the concerto, the main theme of the
opening movement returns, and though it receives an exciting treatment,
again it falls short structurally.  There's no preparation for it, and so
it seems a bit mechanical, like the archetypal Bad Poet who insists on
ending his poem with a repetition of the first line.  As Charles Ives might
say, it's like insisting that a man die in the same town he was born in.
It's not quite that bad because the ending does make a good, though
superficial, effect.

Those who have heard of the Rimsky-Korsakov concerto have undoubtedly
noticed an underwhelming listener response.  Those who have actually heard
it have probably done so through Richter's recording with Kondrashin.
Unfortunately, it bids fair to rank as the worst recording Richter ever
made, mainly due to a truly horrid, obfuscatory recorded sound ("electronic
stereo," yet!), so bad I couldn't begin to argue the merits or defects of
the interpretation itself.  Binns and Lloyd-Jones reveal a lovely, inspired
work, as delicate and poetic as the Schumann concerto.  Rimsky is less
shaky structurally than Balakirev (the concerto develops one folk-like
theme), but he's also less ambitious.  Rimsky is there to sing, rather
than storm the heavens.  He sings beautifully, and his invention runs at a
high level throughout.  The work is in three short movements which proceed
without break.  The entire concerto lasts only slightly longer than the
opening movement of either Balakirev.  He's in, he charms you, he's out.
The scoring bewitches, as you might expect.  It isn't the Brahms d-minor,
but damn, I do want to hear it again.  I can't imagine the current crop of
virtuosi spending the time to learn it, however, so this recording will
probably have to do, which, it turns out, is as exquisite as the work
itself.

Binns is quite fine throughout.  Lloyd-Jones's English Northern Sinfonia
does well in the Rimsky but seems a bit thick in both of the Balakirevs.
In the Balakirev second, they tend to lose the sense of line in the first
movement, stomping and tromping rather than soaring.  However, overall
these performers champion the composers and make a very strong case.
Hyperion's sound is their usual quite fine.

As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the standout releases in Hyperion's
Romantic Piano Concerto series.  If you enjoy Russian nationalist music or
are looking for new, worthy 19th-century repertoire, take a chance on this
disc.

Steve Schwartz