Giovanni Sgambati; Joseph Rheinberger - Piano Concertos (Jorge Bolet; Adrian Ruiz)

Information

Composer: Giovanni Sgambati; Joseph Rheinberger

• (01) Sgambati - Piano Concerto in G minor, Op. 15
• (04) Rheinberger - Piano Concerto in A flat, Op. 94

Jorge Bolet, piano (1-3)
Adrian Ruiz, piano (4-6)

Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra
Ainslee Cox, conductor (1-3)
Zsolt Déaky, conductor (4-6)

Date: 1972/1994
Label: Genesis

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Review

Genesis did well to secure a pianist of Bolet's standing and temperament long before Decca-London took him under its wing. He gives the Sgambati a fiery following wind. Sgambati is attracting more recordings and both Dynamic and ASV are engaged with his chamber music. I await recordings of his two symphonies with avid interest.

The Concerto resonates on the same spiritual wavelength as the Tchaikovsky and Schumann concertos and slightly more obscurely with the decorative delights of the five Saint-Saens and Palmgren works. After an impetuous stormy first movement (almost as long as the whole Berwald concerto), with some hoarse defiance from the brass section, the Romanza is touching and emphatic - replete with many refreshing instrumental details and with ideas of enlivening originality. Think in terms of the middle movements of Beethoven 5 and Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto. The finale is boisterous and if it falls victim to easy bombast is pretty effective in a way similar to the counterpart movement in Stanford's much later second piano concerto. It too is not without fresh poetry as in the piano part at 7.40. The orchestral contribution is a tad throatily undernourished, distant in the strings, unconfident in the woodwind - but nothing to unduly hinder the pleasure of discovery.

Name a single Lichtensteiner composer? Rheinberger is your man. He was less associated with the Principality largely because his fame as a teacher and musician centred on Munich. His half hour concerto parallels the Schumann concerto in its sentiment and pearly ebullience. If it does not have the heavenly inevitability of the Schumann but it abounds in beautiful moments and in sentiment. This is not one of those obscure thin-intellect glitter-vehicles to which nineteenth century re-animative musical archaeology is prone. The strings sound more impressive than in the Sgambati especially in silky calms of the middle movement which, after its Macdowell-accented opening, becomes almost Russian exuding a yearning which is also in the bones of the demonstrative finale.

The disc repays with a rich musical experience - varied and generous combining the contents of two Genesis LPs.

Good notes by Bea Friedland and David Dubal respectively.

We should salute Robert Commagère's excellent work and remind ourselves that these recordings (usually of splendid quality) were made at the excitingly risky cutting edge of discovery at a time when this repertoire was deeply unfashionable.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

More reviews:
https://www.amazon.com/Sgambati-Rheinberger-Piano-Concertos-Joseph/dp/B000005WWM

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Giovanni Sgambati (May 28, 1841 – December 14, 1914) was an Italian pianist, conductor and composer. He was a student of Franz Liszt, and his own compositions were influenced by the music of Beethoven, Wagner and Liszt. Sgambati was a consistent advocate of Italian instrumental music and throughout his life refused to write an opera. This also explains his desire to advance the development of non-Italian symphonic music in his homeland. Sgambati composed two symphonies, several works of chamber music and many works for piano, as well as songs and sacred music, including a requiem.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Sgambati

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Josef Rheinberger (17 March 1839, in Vaduz – 25 November 1901, in Munich) was an organist and composer, born in Liechtenstein and lived most of his life in Germany. The stylistic influences on Rheinberger ranged from Brahms to Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schubert and, above all, Bach. A distinguished teacher, his students included Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Engelbert Humperdinck, Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Rheinberger was also a prolific composer. His works include twelve Masses, a Requiem, a Stabat Mater, several operas, symphonies, chamber music, and choral works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Rheinberger

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Jorge Bolet (November 15, 1914 – October 16, 1990) was a Cuban-born American virtuoso pianist and teacher. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, where his teachers included Leopold Godowsky, Josef Hofmann, David Saperton, Moriz Rosenthal and Fritz Reiner. Bolet is particularly well remembered for his performances and recordings of large-scale Romantic music, particularly works by Liszt, Franck and Chopin. He also specialised in piano transcriptions and unusual repertoire, including the fiendishly difficult works of Godowsky, many of which Bolet had studied with the composer himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Bolet

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Adrian Ruiz (born 17 November, 1937 in Los Angeles) is an American pianist. Ruiz studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczysław Horszowski, then at the University of Southern California. He is the winner of numerous awards, including a prize at the Busoni Competition (1968) and the 1st place at the Concurso de piano Ciudad de Montevideo (1969). He was former Chairman of the Keyboard Studies Department at the University of Southern California School of Music, and was particularly committed to little-known or forgotten works of German romanticism.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Ruiz

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