Replay (December 2024): Edith Peinemann, The French Piano School, Géza Anda & Kolisch String Quartet

Rob Cowan
Friday, November 29, 2024

Rob Cowan’s monthly survey of historic reissues and archive recordings

A musician through and through: violinist Edith Peinemann in 1960 (photo: IMAGO/Michel Neumeister/Bridgeman Images)
A musician through and through: violinist Edith Peinemann in 1960 (photo: IMAGO/Michel Neumeister/Bridgeman Images)

For us record buffs, the term ‘rarity’ has two principal meanings: first-release broadcast material that for the most part has remained gathering dust in the archives, and recordings known to exist but that are otherwise next to impossible to find. Two recent box-sets cover both aspects of rarity, the first from Melo Classic devoted to first-release radio archive recordings by the masterly German violinist Edith Peinemann (1937-2023), a Max Rostal pupil whose one major-label recording was for DG (the Dvo∑ák Concerto with the Czech PO under Peter Maag), which has a fine reputation. Also worth noting are a superb account of the Berg Concerto under Rudolf Kempe (currently available on ‘BBC Legends, Vol 4’ – ICA Classics, 3/24) and an equally memorable Reger Concerto with the Stuttgart Philharmonic under Wolf-Dieter Hauschild (available to download on Amati).

Melo Classic’s nine-CD collection is a mixture of studio and live radio recordings taken down between 1957 and 1990, with superb notes by Christof Honecker and first-rate audio restoration by the set’s producer, Lynn Ludwig. Also included are numerous unfamiliar photographs provided by the Stadtarchiv Mainz. Highlights proliferate. The first disc couples good performances of the Beethoven and Sibelius Concertos recorded in Luxembourg under Carl Melles (1958) and Henri Pensis (1957) respectively, but that’s not where I’d start. Disc 2 features some glorious, tonally generous playing in Tartini’s G minor Concerto (1958, arr Rostal – try the central Grave) and acutely musical accounts of Mozart’s Fifth Concerto and C major Rondo, K373 (both from 1969). Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante, K364, with viola player Bruno Giuranna (1971) combines spirit with an appropriate level of sentiment.

Brahms’s Concerto under Moshe Atzmon (1976) comes some way to justifying the accusation by Joseph Hellmesberger, who conducted the work’s Vienna premiere, that Brahms had written a concerto ‘not for, but against the violin’. Peinemann’s performance is terse and gritty but also – beyond the first movement’s cadenza – serenely beautiful. A 1979 account of Brahms’s Double Concerto with Hans Zender and cellist Maria Kliegel is also memorable. Perhaps my favourite recording in the set closes disc 5 (which also includes the Mendelssohn E minor and Haydn C major Concertos), Schumann’s Concerto as played under Marc Andreae in 1987. More than most (save perhaps for Henryk Szeryng), Peinemann captures the work’s unique combination of pathos and defiance, a performance that fuses thought with feeling, flexibly phrased, though the attack of Peinemann’s bow is fearless.

Of the programmed works with piano, Brahms’s First Sonata (1959) is a very broad 28'54" (a persuasive account by Christian Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt – Ondine, 9/16 – clocks up 26'34"), though Peinemann’s rapport with Magda Rusy (who made a superb recording of Schubert’s Schwanengesang with baritone Eduard Stocker) gets well and truly under the skin of the music. Other excellent duo sonata recordings involve Walter Klien (Mozart K304, Schumann Op 105 and Beethoven No 10, 1980), Jörg Demus (Mozart K379 and Schubert D408 and 574, 1965/77) and others. The set closes with two bigger ensemble pieces, Schubert’s Trout Quintet and Dvořák’s String Quintet Op 77. Nowhere does one sense a lessening of Peinemann’s powers, either musically or technically. She was a musician through and through, something that repeatedly registers during the course of these nine mostly marvellous CDs.

Latest to dust off ancient obscurities released a century ago or more is APR, whose three-CD exploration (two over 80 minutes) of The Earliest French Piano Recordings includes the complete run of solo recordings by Saint-Saëns (plus some with violinist Gabriel Willaume) – surely the most exciting composer-pianist before Bartók – and electric recordings by Francis Planté, set down in his 90th year (Jeremy Nicholas’s superb notes will gen you up on the details). Although significantly superior to everything else in the set sound-wise, compared with the likes of Saint-Saëns, Louis Diémer, Vincent d’Indy, Raoul Pugno, Aimée-Marie Roger-Miclos, Gaston Régis and Lucien Wurmser, they seem terribly heavy-handed, though Jeremy explains what seem like valid reasons for his importance. But turn to Saint-Saëns racing through his Marche militaire française or Roger-Miclos storming the pages of Liszt’s 11th Hungarian Rhapsody and you’re in a world where flames compete for brightness. All these pianists have something novel to convey, Pugno in the Funeral March from Chopin’s Second Sonata anticipating the shock waves that Rachmaninov sent reeling on his legendary RCA electrical recording. Much of this playing is extremely delicate, which invites the question: is ‘horn gramophone’ technology up to capturing its subtleties? After all, Arthur Rubinstein refused to make acoustic recordings because he claimed they made the piano sound like a banjo. A grain of truth there, but only a grain. Generally speaking, scratch levels aside, you soon forget the age of what you’re listening to and begin to enjoy what it teaches you. Vive la différence, as they say across the channel.

The recordings

Radio Archives Edition

Edith Peinemann (Melo Classic)

The French Piano School

The Earliest French Piano Recordings (APR)


Brailowsky in concert

Ukrainian-born Alexander Brailowsky (1896-1976) is one of those pianists whose musical profile as captured on disc varies significantly according to which recording you’re sampling. His pre-war Polydor 78s reveal a brazen virtuoso (witness Liszt’s version of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture as transferred by Pristine or Danacord) whereas his late Chopin for Sony (in stereo) is uncomfortably stiff-jointed. Turn then to Melo Classic’s set of ‘Live Concert Performances in Europe’ and you understand the origins of Brailowsky’s high reputation. OK, Liszt’s Totentanz (with the RTF National Orchestra under André Cluytens, 1958) might occasionally fall off track, but the performance nonetheless generates levels of excitement that few others even approach. Likewise Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor Concerto (Stockholms Konsertföreningens Orkester, Carl Garaguly, 1951) fires off machine-gun octaves and the finale of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, 1958) alternates great breadth (the opening) with lightning speed (the finale’s fugato), while also claiming a level of eloquence (especially in the slow movement) that at times recalls Moiseiwitsch, even Rachmaninov himself. Chopin’s First Concerto (Orchestre de Radio-Luxembourg, Louis de Froment, 1962) and Schumann’s A minor (Froment again in 1962) suggest an aristocrat of the piano that the commercial discs rather sidestep, and the transfers are first-rate throughout. Strongly recommended.

The recording

Live Concert Performances In Europe

Alexander Brailowsky (Melo Classic)


Géza Anda live

Another pianistic aristocrat (a ‘troubadour of the piano’, as Furtwängler called him), the Swiss-Hungarian Géza Anda, had an endless range of shades and colours at his fingertips and could adjust his playing style to such disparate conductors as Mengelberg and Boulez. Hearing him play live alongside Karl Böhm with an occasionally untidy Philharmonia in 1965 (Musikfestwochen Luzern, Brahms’s First Piano Concerto) and a pristine Vienna Philharmonic (at the 1974 Salzburg Festival, Mozart’s Concerto No 18 in B flat, K456) is a warming experience, the Brahms (in mono) warm and pliable – Böhm is on especially good form here, especially in the quieter music – though the more softly sung Mozart, which is captured in superior stereo sound, yields the sort of intimate magic familiar from Anda’s complete Mozart concerto cycle for DG. There the B flat Concerto, recorded in Salzburg in 1965, harbours a central Andante that is considerably swifter than the performance we hear live – 10'14" as opposed to 12'07". Whether we needed Austrian radio’s meticulously articulated multilingual spoken announcements is open to question, but at least they are separately tracked. Most important is the meeting of musical minds between Anda’s flawless musicianship and Böhm’s commanding if rather more formal manner, especially as Anda’s way with the Brahms D minor is less familiar than his interpretations of the B flat (twice recorded, and with which he made his name at the age of 20 in 1941). Another winner.

The recording

Brahms. Mozart Piano Concertos

Géza Anda; Philh Orch; VPO / Karl Böhm (Prospero)


A pioneering quartet

Pianist Hortense Monath (1905‑56), programme director and co-founder (in 1936) of Manhattan’s famed New Friends of Music, was the first American woman pianist to solo with the NBC Symphony Orchestra (in 1941). She worked with Ernest Hutcheson and Artur Schnabel, and was an important early proponent of Schoenberg, which reflects in her bold playing with the Kolisch String Quartet in Schumann’s E flat Piano Quartet, Op 47. She’s seemingly the driving force behind the Scherzo and finale, music that flies off the page as if the ink were still wet, while the Andante cantabile slow movement, although uncommonly swift, is full of feeling. The main body of this Kolisch collection is devoted to works by Mozart (String Quartets K575 and 589), Rudolf Kolisch amazingly dextrous in the first movement of K575. Then there’s Schubert’s great G major Quartet, D887, played with a degree of urgency that suggests these new music specialists have located dark prophecies in the score that other groups, even the finest of them – then and now – haven’t sensed. Schubert’s Quartettsatz is shorn of repeats, while his A minor Quartet, D804, gains from an up-tempo approach. Mozart’s A Musical Joke (with horn players John Barrows and Domenico Caputo) is humorous principally for sounding so po-faced. The transfers are excellent, and so are the notes.

The recording

Mozart. Schubert. Schumann

Hortense Monath; Kolisch String Quartet (Biddulph)

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