From Tahra’s ever-industrious studios comes the latest entrant
in its Westminster Archives series. It conjoins the series’s hero,
Hermann Scherchen, with that admirable pianist Edith Farnadi.
The result is
a quintet of concerto performances recorded in Vienna between
1952 and 1953. The two Liszt concertos are the openers and
they prove her worth in this repertoire. Back in LP days HMV
picked up on her Nixa recital of the Légendes as well as the
Ballades in D flat major
and B minor. and their perspicacity was warranted. She was
assuredly a notable Liszt proponent and it’s good to see that
these performances, as well as others including the Hungarian
Rhapsodies, the Totentanz and Hungarian Fantasy are now available
on the Naxos Classical Archives. They were all made contemporaneously
with these Vienna sessions – an especially high and visible
point in her discography.
The
concertos display all the virtues of mettle and drama that
one could have inferred from those other performances. There
is considerable excitement and despite the period sound what
emerges is a fine equipoise between dramatic self assertion
and poetic lyricism. The Hungarian-born soloist understands
the natural crests of the rhythmic profile and performs with
panache and a certain coiled tensile quality throughout.
She
also plays two Bartók concertos. She’d studied with Arnold
Székely who had studied alongside Bartók at the Budapest Academy
so her lineage was taut. Not only was she busy in the studios
recording Liszt but at around the time of these Bartók sessions
she set down Mikrokosmos on the WWN label as well as
the Allegro barbaro, so it can be seen that was extensively
admired in the repertoire. Of the two concerto performances
the Third is, to me, the more successful. There is plenty
of fine playing in the Second and the collaboration with Scherchen
was auspicious. The orchestra comes under pressure from time
to time but acquits itself well. What limits complete admiration
is a feeling that things are held in reserve. The performance
of the Third might surprise by virtue of an amount of metrical
freedom allowed to the soloist but it works within the general
structural and expressive parameters of the music. Farnadi
proves a resilient and tonally flexible proponent and Scherchen,
alert to the lexicon of contemporary writing, no less so.
The uneasy sense of concertante reserve that haunts part of
the Second does not emerge in this vigorously engaging recording
of the Third.
The
Rachmaninoff performance was apparently not that well received
at the time by critics. The piano is rather forward in an
accepted manner and the strings don’t sing out in their opening
paragraphs. The opening is reserved. But what you will hear,
for this date, is a great deal of digital detail. There’s
stoic nobility to the collaboration between Farnadi and Scherchen,
an avoidance of obvious Romantic gestures and effusiveness
that will intrigue. The string tone remains thin however,
which is a pity. And it’s certainly not a performance for
every day.
These
restorations are worthily returned to the catalogue. They
document a valuable association between conductor and soloist
in well managed transfers.
Jonathan Woolf
Edith Farnadi (piano)
