Customer Reviews

Tchaikovsky: Concerto No. 1/Rachmaninoff: Concerto No. 2

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are no words to describe this CD accurately. It is, by far, the greatest recording of the Tchaikowsky concerto ever made, by the greatest pianist in the world. (If you disagree about the pianist part, I beg your pardon :)
I recently had the wonderful privilege of hearing Van Cliburn live, at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, VA. He played the Tchaikowsky concerto, and I've never been so thrilled in my life. Though even the live performance didn't match up to this recording.
The Tchaikowsky is played with a passion and sincerity so beautiful and genuine that it makes your heart ache. The Rachmaninoff has all the gusto, fire, and flair that you could ever wish. Five stars is not a high enough rating for this CD - an unbelievable recording.

If you don't have it, get it so you'll find out what you've been missing!

Nina Plant Wideman was a great friend to Van Cliburn, and she was my teacher. When I got the opportunity to meet Van at a concert in Shreveport, his graciousness completely overwhelmed me. He spent over an hour after the concert talking to me and invited me to come back for the concert the next day. He met me on that next day at the door of the New Civic Theater and took me to a place behind the curtains where I could stand during the performance. I would not be seen by the audience from this vantage point, but would get to watch his hands from no more than 10 feet away. Many years later, one of my cousins met Van in Seattle and mentioned that he had a cousin who had played with the Shreveport Symphony and Van called me by name. What a prince of a man. His hands and heart gave us a great gift. I heard this fabulous recording before it was made into a CD (at Mrs. Wideman's home), and I hope the man is doing well.

This is a historic recording, featuring Cliburn's performance of the Tchaikovsky 1st (which helped win him the gold metal in Moscow) and Rachmaninoff's 2nd concerto.

An adjective I would use to discribe Cliburn's playing here is 'thoughtful'. He has an amazing talent for bringing out melodies and voices that get lost in the bustle of many other performances of this concerto. Although he takes some passages at a slower tempo than I've heard elsewhere, the payoff is that the listener gets to hear in exquisite detail each voice and melody in the piano portion of the concerti. This is one of the best played performances out there of these works.

Unfortunately, it is not quite so up there in terms of the recording quality. The problem isn't so much with the sound (which is perfectly clear) as with its balance. As one reviewer already remarked, there is a tendency to focus on whichever instrument is carrying the solo/melodic line at the moment, making the other parts much less audible by comparison (both for the piano as soloist and various instruments in the orchestra).
If only the engineers had brought the same clarity and balance to the voices in the orchestra as Cliburn brought to the voices in the piano part, this would be my ideal recording.

This is one of my favorite CDs, especially for the powerful, passionate play of the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto #2. There is no word could describe what the enormous emotion the music has brought. I had another version which was played by Vladimir Ashkenazy. By comparing these 2, I would just simply grap Cliburn's, which really brings out the fantasy of the music. I highly recommend this piece.

Sometimes even if you are an old folky who has been recently obsessed with jazz, you get in the mood for some elegant highbrow stuff. I owned this on vinyl when I was in high school, and recently renewed my friendship with it on CD. Van Cliburn, the tall tuxedoed Texan, wowed the Russkies in 1958 by winning their own piano contest, playing a piece by one of their own composers. 'Bout a month later, he showed his talent at Carnegie Hall in this recorded concert. A lot of Americans went nuts over him, and he even got a NYC ticker-tape parade. They don't throw parades for musicians very often. Buy the CD to find out why he deserved the praise. Read the other reviewers first. This is 68 lovely minutes of piano and orchestra. Lots of emotion in the playing. No, he ain't Monk or Peterson or Brubeck, but heck, he ain't bad. For a year or two, he was a cultural phenomenon in our country, getting as much publicity as Eminem or Britney Spears gets nowadays. Hard to believe the country would pay that kind of attention to a serious artist. This was the one classical record you could find in most homes in the early 60's, just like the one jazz record you'd likely find was "Peter Gunn" by Henry Mancini, and the one folk album was "The Kingston Trio" debut featuring the hit "Tom Dooley." It's nice to have my old friend Van doing the Russian concertos in my living room again. When I am in the mood for this, I usually play it two or three times straight through. Then I might go back to jazz for six months, but I never forget how satisfying this performance is.

I wasn't even born when Cliburn took the world by storm, winning the Tchaikovsky competition in the Soviet Union. But the legend still lived on when I was taking piano lessons at the age of nine. While I was growing up, listening to any Cliburn recording conjured up the swell of pride that our nation felt about him, and that extra-musical element added to the joy of his music-making.

We often focus on Cliburn's victory in the Soviet Union as a uniquely American victory. A lanky Texan walked into the Soviet Union, our Cold War enemy, and played Russian music to a severely discerning Russian audience, completely bowling them over. Khrushchev had to give permission to the judges to give Cliburn the Gold Medal because it represented such an embarassment to the Soviet Union to have their pianists lose to an American.

In truth, it was also a victory for the Russians. To find that their music could be played with such understanding and depth by a young man so culturally and geographically removed from the Russian people proved that Russian music is universal -- it transcends cultural boundaries. That an American could be taught to play Russian music so brilliantly could only mean that Russian music was so great and compelling that it could speak to the soul of any human being regardless of his or her background.

In other words, it was a win-win situation for America and Russia, and this recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto becomes the place of meeting where both Russians and Americans can celebrate. Having Kiril Kondrashin, the famed Soviet conductor, lead the orchestra only serves to make that point even clearer.

This extra-musical element has always imbued Cliburn's recording with a sense of occasion. But one would be remiss if one thought that this recording was special only because of Cliburn's sweet victory. The discerning Russian audience knew what it heard was great, and this recording taken from a Carnegie Hall concert shortly after the competition makes it clear what they were so excited about.

Cliburn is a big-hearted player. He has a generous, open style that is utterly disarming. His playing is full of lyricism, grandeur, majesty and heart. It is particularly revealing to compare Cliburn's recording with another Tchaikovsky recording imbued with a sense of occasion: Horowitz and Toscanini.

On April 25, 1943, the great Russian pianist Vladimir Horowitz played a benefit performance of the Tchaikovsky 1st piano concerto at Carnegie Hall with the legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. Money from the performance went to support the war effort by purchasing war bonds. The musicians brought a special fervor to the performance inspired by their patriotism for their new-found homeland. Here, again, the Tchaikovsky concerto became the medium through which cultural boundaries were transcended. But no playing could be more diametrically opposed to Cliburn's playing than Horowitz's.

If Horowitz's performance represented the pinnacle of what Russian's might expect from the Tchaikovsky concerto, then Cliburn brought a whole new perspective to the piece. Where Horowitz is incisive and brilliant, Cliburn is broad, noble and majestic. Where Horowitz can play at lightening-fast speeds, Cliburn chooses to slow the tempo in order to capture the ardour and sweep of the musical line. If the Russians were accustomed to Horowitz or Horowitz-like playing, then Cliburn's performance was a new revelation and marked a turning point in the way the Tchaikovsky concerto would be heard and performed.

Cliburn's performance may not have been as boldly different in conception as I argue above (after all, his teacher was a Russian pianist named Rosina Lhevinne), but it has become the standard by which I compare all other performances that have come after him. And the Horowitz recording I mentioned is a standard by which all pre-Cliburn performances get measured. They are so different and deserve to be heard in tandem to experience how a single piece of music can be interpreted in different ways.

The recording of Rachmaninoff's 2nd piano concerto comes from a later date (with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony). This, too, has been my standard for Rach 2. Cliburn brings the same generous lyrical style to this most familiar piano concerto.

I highly recommend this disc, especially because of the historical moment it captures, but also because the performances are without peer.

Cliburn took the world by storm in his early twenties. If you listen to this, you'll see why. Go straight to Rachmaninov on track four and you'll be lifted out of your seat. He plays with total ease and authority - you could be forgiven for thinking that he's conducting simultaneously - which says something for what Reiner can do.
Tchaikovsky's 1st is equally as good, but with candlelight and the 2nd, you're assured of a seductive experience. Or at least, your seductee is. You can always listen to the 1st in the morning...

... like the butterflies of my first French kiss (thanx, Pamela H.), my first time at the wheel of a sailboat, the peace of Christmas Eve Midnight Mass at St. Mary's Church in Nazareth, Israel, the whole range of emotions witnessing the birth of my children, and the goosebumps that had every hair standing on end the first time I heard this recording (on vinyl). This recording spoiled me; no other interpretation of the Tchaikovsky B-flat concerto comes close (for me).

Everything else I wanted to say, has been said. For an American to take First prize, in Moscow, in 1958 ... well ... obviously, I wasn't the only one impressed. If you love piano and/or Tchaikovsky, you owe this one to yourself ...

By means of comparison, this is the best ever recorded work of Rachmaninov's 2nd Concerto. I tend to buy classical cd's, lp's, and tapes and compare the soloist's and orchestra's performance to other recordings of the same work. There is a cd out with Andre Watts performing Rach 3 and Phillip Entremont playing the Rach 2, as he does well; However without such *clarity* of emotion as Van Cliburn, and without that gut-wrenching desparity. In most places you can even find the old recordings of Sergei Rachmaninov performing his second piano concerto, but he plays it almost... impatiently; Like he was waiting to hurry up and get the performance done so he could go bar-hopping.

Tchaikowsky's 1st is a great performance by Cliburn, no doubt, and I'm sure many people would buy this recording for that particular piece. But, the performance of the Rach 2 is simply unsurpassed. Within the first 15 seconds, in the opening bars of Rach 2 part 1 you are dropped into a world of very brooding darkness. Sergei has a way in the Rach 2 of making these ever-so familiar patterns and rhythms repeatedly milk the life out of you. So no, this is not a wedding album. :-) Also, this is not your typical, pompous, arrogant British tea party classical music either. It's alot more for the lovers of true classical music and those who can absorb real emotion.

Hours and hours of this magnificient, sonorous, brilliant work of art played over and over again in my home without a hint of listening fatigue is beyond compare. These pieces of music are played for the audience, the artists' care for their audience proven without question.

A long and celebrated career will ensue for any one who can reproduce the authors'works as here discovered.

By two.

Dr. Mario T. Scaduto Ph.D.