This is one in a long
line of recent Sony Serkin reissues
that seem to have been the responsibility
of the French wing, co-ordinated by
Eric Guillemaud and with notes by the
ever high falutin’ André Tubeuf,
blessedly remembered from those Référence
LPs, who is still churning it out in
the old way. As elsewhere in this series
we have some late–ish recordings yoked
to some early-ish ones. Here a 1955
recording of the unfinished torso of
D840, the two-movement Reliquie,
is conjoined with D960. The results
are seldom less than absorbing though
not always compelling.
Serkin was not as slow
as Richter in the opening movement of
the B flat major but he was certainly
expansive. For all this, and despite
some rather heavily italicised phrasing,
there is something touching, in the
deepest sense, in Serkin’s exploration
of this movement not least in his repeat
of the exposition. He vests phrases
with a complex layer of meaning even
if, in the end, his tempo is just too
extended for me. Here Curzon in his
1970 recording at Snape seems to me
to get closer to the music’s heart and
at a more apposite tempo. Serkin’s slow
movement isn’t especially distended
and achieves a certain rugged grandeur,
an honest stripping away of inessentials
even though there are times, because
of his playing, when things maybe seem
slower than they are. The Scherzo and
the Finale also seem to be freighted
with a degree of heaviness that militates
against the freedoms and flexibilities
that the music ideally requires. Some
of the accenting in particular is too
onerous.
The earlier 1955 recording
was recorded at a lower level and according
to the notes this was the first of Schubert’s
works that Serkin recorded (not true
in a strict sense, as he’d recorded
the Fantasia with his father-in-law
Adolf Busch in 1931). In 1955 he sounds
more lithe and correspondingly more
acutely responsive than his later self,
even in a torso such as this, binding
the rhetoric that much more sharply.
The remastering seems
convincing enough in the case of the
1975 recording whilst the earlier one
bears the hallmarks of slightly constricted
1955 sound, though certainly not enough
to trouble listeners.
Jonathan Woolf
Rudolf Serkin (piano) 
