RUSSIANS came late to piano playing. The important keyboard players in early 19th century Russia were foreigners - the list included the Irishman John Field and two Germans - Steibelt (who had been unwise enough to enter into a contest with Beethoven in Vienna) and Henselt. Yet from the advent of the great Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) the same Rubinstein whose opera The Demon was heard at the 1994 Wexford Festival - pianists have been emerging from Russia in almost reckless profusion.
Rubinstein himself was one of a kind, great enough to have his playing compared to Liszt's ("to the disadvantage of neither", as the New Grove tactfully puts it) and with an apparently unrivalled ability for great music-making Without needing to respect the fight notes. An early, generally adulatory biography, published while Rubinstein was still alive even took the trouble to chide "enthusiastic critics who maintain that the wrong notes of Rubinstein are better than the right notes of others". ("Better say," suggested the author, "that these wrong notes are cast into the depths of oblivion by the grandeur of his right ones.")
In addition to his performing and composing, Rubinstein found time to establish the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1862, and invited Leschetizky to head up the piano department. Leschetizky, who could trace his pianistic lineage back to Beethoven via Czerny (also the teacher of Liszt), was among the most influential teachers of his time. He numbered among his pupils artists as diverse as the great Beethoven player Artur Schnabel (to whom Leschetizky often said "You will never be a pianist. You are a musician.") and Paderewski, arguably this century's most popular pianist, who, after the first World War, was to become prime minister of an independent Poland, find after Leschetizky returned to Vienna in 1892 his wife, Anna Essipova (one of four pupils he married), remained on the staff of the St Petersburg Conservatory, the Moscow Conservatory was established in 1866 with another Rubinstein, Anton's brother Nikolai, as director and Tchaikovsky among its teachers.
Great figures were soon appearing in the concert halls; composer pianists such as Rachmaninov Scriabin, Prokofiev, and, later Horowitz, who managed to establish his name as a byword for sheer virtuosity. The special character of Russian keyboard style Seems to have been established early on. A 1906 biography of Leschetizky explains: "The Russians stand first in his opinion. United to a prodigious technique, they have passion, dramatic power, elemental three, and extraordinary vitality. Turbulent natures difficult to keep within bounds, but making wonderful players when they have the patience to endure to the end."
The performing careers of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Horowitz (as of many other Russian performers, up to and including the much loved "great Romantic", Shura Cherkassky, who died last week) were based not in post revolutionary Russia but in the West. The interruption of the second World War and the cultural politics of the Cold War which succeeded it kept Western knowledge of Russian piano playing in a patchy state.
In the early post war years, the pianist officially favoured for foreign touring was Emil Gilels. So for instance, in 1960 when Sviatoslav Richter was finally heard outside the ambit of the Eastern bloc, he was in his midforties and the effect on audiences and critics was sensational - it has even been compared to the emergence of Paganini from Italy at a similar age. In the mid 1970s the international career of Lazar Berman, then also in his mid forties, took off in similar style. And of course, the spectacular successes of Soviet performers on the international competition circuit offered regular reinforcement of the Russian mystique.
As with so many aspects of life in the former Soviet Union, there is a lot in the music world yet to be uncovered. The first instalment - 10 volumes - of the BMG Melodiya label's Russian Piano School She Great Pianists series is now offering an insight into performers, familiar and little known.
Richter, for instance, can be heard in some militarily exact Bach (recorded in 1948, these performances are among his earliest recordings), and a heart of the matter, matter of fact performance of Haydn's late Sonata in C that remains strangely unsettling by suggesting more than it can deliver.
The Richter disc emanates from live performances as does Gilels's, the whole of which was taped in St Petersburg in 1968. The powerhouse opening of the Bach/Busoni Prcludc and Fugue in the tong as it were, dug out of the quite metallic sounding instrument - sets the scene for a Gilels of the grand manner essaying some out of the way repertoire (Weber's A flat Sonata) as well Liszt's virtuoso warhorse Rhapsodic espagnole. The outgoing playing style may come as a real surprise to anyone familiar only with the more circumspect music making of Gilels's final years.
Lazar Berman is represented by his breathtaking if murkily recorded 1959 account of Liszt's complete Transcendental Studies. Berman is one of the few performers whose trust in these pieces seems so great that he plays them totally without concern for self aggrandisement. And his technical equipment is such that the idea of barriers between conception and realisation seems thoroughly irrelevant.
Turning to less familiar names Heinrich Neuhaus (1888-1964) is best remembered as a teacher. He was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to 1964, and Richter, Gilels and Kadu Lupu are the best known of his pupils. Neuhaus's style, reserved of personality yet forthright of expression, is heard at its best in his graceful handling of Mozart's Sonata for two pianos (his partner here is his son, Stanislav) and Prokofiev's quite magical set of miniatures, Visions fugitives.
Alexander Goldenweiser (1875-1961) was responsible for the education of more than 200 pianists and was so celebrated during his lifetime ("bleaker of Russian pianists") that his flat was opened as a museum. As a young man, he mixed with Tolstoy as well as Rachmaninov and Scriabin, and although the BMG Melodiya recordings were all made when he was past 70, the old fashioned firmness and nobility of his playing are well evidenced. He was the dedicated of Rachmaninov's op. 17, the Second Suite for two pianos, so his performance (with Grigory Ginsburg) carries a special aura of authenticity, and he can also be heard in music of his own as well as by one of his teachers, Arensky.
One of Goldenweiser's pupils was Samuel Feinberg (1890-1962), also a composer and, additionally, an arranger of distinction. A full half hour of his disc is given over to arrangements of organ works by Bach in predominantly stately performances which convey a mood of profound spirituality. The other composer represented is Mozart, whose Sonata in E flat K282, is handled with an idiosyncratically velvet touch which may transcend all known precepts of style but which I found ceaselessly intriguing.
Maria Yudina's (1899-1970) strongly sculpted and at times fiercely projected playing was informed by a lively interest in contemporary music, both at home and abroad. Late in her life she corresponded with the likes of Boulez, Messiaen Nono and Stockhausen, and before that she managed to fall foul of the authorities and be dismissed from her teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory.
She plays a programme of Stravinsky, Bartok Hindemith Berg and Krenek with unusual intellectual conviction. Every musical gesture, whether orthodox or unorthodox has she makes you teed been not just considered but already argued over the most celebrated of the lesser know players is Vladimir Sofronitzky (1901-1961), son in law of Scriabhl and widely held to be his finest interpreter. Sofronitzky's who had an international career in the inter war years, didn't have it in him to work within the structures of Soviet officialdom. His career and livelihood through travel restrictions and lowly teaching position) suffered as a result and his frustration led him to alcohol and drugs. A complete recital (Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Scriabin) taped the year before his death, makes up the bulk of a two-CD set, but there are also recordings from 1946 and 1953 of some lesser known pieces by Prokofiev.
Sotronitzky held in the highest esteem by Colleagues in his native Country but still little known abroad, was an unpredictable performer. The composer Rodion Shchedrin recalled performances when "forgetting the text, he left the stage, came back and erred again". There is in his playing a famous sense of poetry, but also a rarely encountered fever, intensity and fearlessness, and, in his favourite composer, Scriabin, a lightness of pedalling and a facility with layering which results in a unique chiaroscuro.
The youngest pianists to feature in the first instalment of the BMG Melodiya series are Mikhail Pletnev (born 1957) and Evgeny Kissin (born 1971). Pletnev's playing of his own arrangement of a suite from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker recorded in 1978, the year he took first prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition, is a piano feat that absolutely demands to be heard. Sadly, the sonatas by Prokofiev (No. 7) and Mozart (K570) are remarkably less interesting - the latter, in particular, burdened with an air of heavy pedantry.
The Kissin recordings of Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Prokofiev are from concerts given at the age of 13 and 15, and serve to confirm - as if confirmation were needed that he was among the most remarkable prodigies of our time.
Commentators tend to get themselves tied in knots when confronted with playing as all embracingly satisfying as the young Kissin was capable of. As Grigory Sokolov winner at the age of 16 of the Tchaikovsky Competition and soloist in the Tchaikovsky concerto with the NSO at the NCH tonight - has put it: "If the musician is young, it means that his performance is fresh and spontaneous; if the musician is no longer so young his interpretation is marked with wisdom and maturity. It is absolutely wrong. A true musician can and must be mature fit a vary early age." The playing of the teenage Kissin may threaten the idea that with age comes wisdom: you just have to listen to this CO to hear the logic defied.
