Rubinstein

From December on, "Arthur Rubinstein The Complete Album Collection" will be the world's biggest CD edition for a solo artist according to Guinness World Records (TM). It features all the legendary pianist's issued recordings made by RCA Victor between 1940 and 1976, and includes one LP issued on the DECCA label in 1978. The collection also includes the recordings Rubinstein made in England for the English label His Master's Voice (HMV) between 1928 and 1940, most of which were released in the United States by RCA on its Victor label. The collection includes complete studio and live performances, solo, concerto and chamber music repertoire in reproductions of original LP sleeves and labels, the earlier recordings, initially released on 78-rpm discs, appear in three sets with 14 CDs in the edition.

In his lifetime, Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) was most celebrated as a pianist and was often considered Liszt's only real rival. However, he was also an extremely productive composer, his output including eight concertos, two of which are for 'cello.

The G major Anton Rubinstein violin concerto is a fine and powerful work, quite as good as many a lesser-known Russian example in the same genre, and easily as deserving of wider currency as, say, the Taneyev Suite de Concert, which is just as rarely heard these days. Nishizaki gives a committed and polished reading, though you often feel that this is music written by a pianist who had marginally less facility when writing for the violin. Still, here’s a well-schooled performance, full of agreeable touches of imagination (the Andante shows Nishizaki’s fine-spun tone to particularly good effect) delivered with crisply economical urgency that makes good musical sense even of the work’s plainer and less idiomatic passages.

These two works are undoubtedly the greatest of the forgotten concertos we have not previously tackled and have been much requested. Both were written by hugely successful virtuoso pianists who were also composers, and both had a major place in the nineteenth-century repertoire, only falling from favour in the 1920s as modernism found its place in the concert hall.

Nowadays there are a great many people who, upon encountering the name Rubinstein, would only think automatically of the Polish pianist, the late Artur Rubinstein. However, our subject (no relation) is the once world-renowned Russian composer and pianist Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein who was born in Balta Podalia (Ukraine) on 28 November 1829. He died in Peterhof on 20 November 1894. In his lifetime, Anton Rubinstein was highly regarded as a pianist, as a conductor, as the first great Russian teacher whose methods and administration are still echoed in the modern Russian musical institutions, and as a prolific composer.

This DVD is the first release of this legendary performance by a legendary artist. "Rubinstein's superb form is matched by the incredible musical sensitivity of Haitink and the orchestra… Sounds and images are expertly cued to the split second… Rubinstein's face, body and hands are captured in a smooth flow of shots and reflectionsThe Beethoven takes on an almost Mozartean delicacy, the Brahms is infused with all the power it requires." -The New York Times

Time has brushed lightly against this remarkable man … Nothing appears to have impaired Rubinstein's unique wit, his sensitity, his urbanity or his cool-headed, warm-hearted, ever-idelaistic honesty … The concertos are imbued with an extraordinary fusion of twilight sentiment and nonchalant joie de vivre. Even more remarkable, however, are the flashes of self-revelation that emerge in Rubinstein's words. (Martin Bernheimer)