AVAILABILITY
www.aprrecordings.co.uk
APR distinguished themselves
with their Medtner discs, which were
reviewed on this site [Vol
1, Vol
2], and they now give prominence
to another composer-pianist in this
commanding double set devoted to the
HMV solo recordings of Dohnányi
made between 1929 and 1956. Readers
will doubtless have comes across his
famous recordings of the Variations
on a Nursery Theme and maybe too of
his Mozart Piano Concerto K453. But
I suspect that only pianophiles of considerable
ingenuity will have heard many, if any,
of these solo discs and certainly not
the uncommon November 1929 Budapest
disc (AN 443) which inaugurated the
set.
Dohnányi was
born and studied in Pressburg, the coronation
city of Hungary, now Bratislava, the
Slovakian capital. At seventeen he went
to Budapest, studying with teachers
who were variously Lisztian and Brahmsian
in outlook and he was so impressive
a student that he graduated early. By
nineteen he had made prestigious debuts
in Berlin, Vienna and London and in
1905 was appointed as head of Piano
at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik
though he returned to Budapest in 1915
and increasingly took on administrative
and conducting positions, in addition
to his piano playing and his composition.
HMV recorded a number
of Hungarian musicians around the time
of the session with Dohnányi.
A year earlier they’d managed to get
famed violin pedagogue Jenö Hubay
into the studios to record principally
his own compositions as indeed they’d
done with Bartók. So the precedent
was set. As with both Hubay and Bartók,
he also made recordings for a local
company as well. He expanded his discography
for HMV in London in 1931, managing
also to record his Nursery Variations
for Columbia there, but this was
the extent of his pre-War HMV recordings.
They were augmented by the post-War
visits of 1946 and in 1956, during the
course of which he re-recorded The
Six Piano Pieces that he’d set during
that earlier visit.
In the light of the
relative paucity of his own playing
in the catalogues we may be forgiven
for thinking him an occasional pianist
but history does not support this partial
view. He was a pianist of immense position
and gifts as had been recognised from
his first professional engagements.
His American years, in the immediate
post War period, were clouded, but he
still managed to retain a degree of
concert importance. He still recorded.
Though they are imperfect in some ways
it would be good to have a comprehensive
re-release, for example, of the sonata
recordings he made with Albert Spalding.
The character pieces
he recorded are all graced with his
tonal beauty and expressive contour.
Composers can tend to be brusque with
their own music but one never feels
that here – indeed when he came to re-make
the early Hungarian recording of Pastorale
nearly thirty years later he was
even more generously expressive with
it than he had been in 1929. The famous
Strauss arrangements, of course, are
here in all their dramatic finery in
these 1931 sides. In 1946 he recorded
the Six Piano Pieces Op.41. These
veer from the Impressionistic (the Impromptu)
to the frolicsome (Scherzino)
and take in glorious fast-moving cascading
rivulets and a leonine power (Cloches).
When he re-recorded the set in 1956
this Andante had tightened up
slightly (it seems to me that he draws
out the elliptical quality of it even
more evocatively in 1956), but, understandably,
he was no longer quite able to keep
up with his own instruction for Cascades
(Il più presto possible).
The Ten Bagatelles (Winterreigen)
derive from the 1956 sessions when the
composer was seventy-nine. There is
still pellucid beauty in Widmung,
an exceptional sense of excavated drama
in Sphärenmusik, where the
linear curve and trills accompany the
tied repeated notes in conveying tremendous
atmospheric compression. He has the
digital flexibility for Um Mitternacht,
no question, and the rhythmic nuance
and panache for Tolle Gesellschaft.
His beautifully calibrated
Brahmsian inheritance is best appreciated
in the Intermezzo in F minor,
from the Four Piano Pieces Op.2
No.3 and his baroque instincts from
the Pavane (and the not-very-Gavotte-like
Gavotte and Musette in B flat).
One has to be won over by the insistent
gravity of the Sarabande from
the Suite nach altem Stil (Suite
in the Olden Style) and the companion
Gigue – joyful and that constantly
flirts with fugato, full of skitter
and scudding humour.
What is especially
noteworthy about this release is that
the stereo tapes are being used for
the first time. There was an in-tandem
stereo and mono set up in the studio
but no stereo recordings were made on
one particularly productive day – so
mono tapes have been employed. To all
of these Bryan Crimp has had access
and I’m particularly glad he favoured
the stereo over the mono Sarabande
and Menuet movements of the
Op.24 Suite that, for all that Dohnányi
wasn’t finger perfect, are truly winning.
As with all such comparable
releases from this company we are in
safe hands: comprehensive, chronological
and with intelligent notes are provided.
These are clearly laid out typographically,
First class copies have been tracked
down and transferred with skill and
care,. Furthermore the restorative effect
on Dohnányi’s pianistic reputation
will, one hopes, be considerable.
Jonathan Woolf
Ernst von Dohnányi (piano)