Live Classics are now embarking on a Natalia Gutman
series, though many of her performances with her late husband, Oleg
Kagan, have been issued through the 1990s in their Kagan Edition. Part
of a charmed circle of like-minded musicians devoted to contemporary,
classical and romantic performances, Gutman is as much at home in Schubert
as she is in Shostakovich. She has in fact recorded the concertos commercially
with the RPO conducted by Yuri Temirkanov (RCA RD 87918) but these Live
Classics performances predate the RCA by some years; the first concerto
dates from 1976 and the second from a decade later – both were taped
in Moscow.
Gutman shares with Kagan significant profiles – expressivity
without great opulence of sound projection, a concern for clarity of
articulation and a general avoidance of any coarsening of tone, not
least in fast passagework. If this is indicative of a certain reserve
then it’s a highly developed and cultivated one, deeply considered,
which brings many rewards. Kagan studied with Oistrakh and Gutman with
Rostropovich and her recording will inevitably provoke comparison with
his. There are – or were – at least five Rostropovich traversals of
the first concerto and three of the second; the dizzying appearance
of his broadcast and concert legacy means that as soon as one performance
departs the catalogue another magically appears. There are significant
differences of approach, both architectural and tonal, between the two
performers and Gutman’s are well able to stand on their own terms. The
flattened aural perspective of the 1976 First Concerto doesn’t flatter
the performers – it’s close-up and uningratiating. Nevertheless Kondrashin
was seldom capable of dull conducting and encourages sectional playing
of vehemence and clarity. Gutman is never as feelingly dramatic as is
Heinrich Schiff in his reading on Phillips with Maxim Shostakovich conducting
the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (412 526-2PH) and her tonal resources
do not stretch to his. Tonal gradations are significantly more powerfully
realised in Schiff’s performance. Gutman’s though is a telling reading
bettered, I think, by her way with No. 2, which also may be the greater
work. In its biting introspection and in the dark cadenza of the first
movement her sense of design and her conception of the architecture
of the work are never in doubt. Kitajenko brings out the savagely whooping
horns in the second Allegretto with real aplomb; Gutman’s relatively
clear-eyed playing should not be mistaken for coldness – it is a different
means to an end, an individual mediation through the density of Shostakovich’s
writing and admirable in its way. To complete the disc we have Schnittke’s
Dialogue - an arch from introspection to snarling and fractious chamber
orchestra interjections and through them to a degree of not unclouded
resolution.
Jonathan Woolf
Natalia Gutman, cello