„Chesky Records“ gehört unbestritten zu den führenden audiophilen Labels...

Another winner in Audite's invaluable ongoing series of historic reissues from 1950s German radio archives. As usual, the new remasterings derive from the original master tapes, with clearly audible superiority to any previous releases on other labels. The Mozart concertos and Schumann pieces were recorded for Berlin RIAS under studio conditions between January 1953 and November 1954. They are supplemented by two live performances, including a second Mozart K 466 taken from a concert the day before its studio retaping for RIAS (and thus affording the opportunity to compare the same performance under live and studio conditions on consecutive days).

Mozart's piano concertos, or a few of them, were central to Haskil's limited repertoire. Her performance style in this music is well known – precise fingerwork, a rather small-scale lyricism characterized by great subtlety of tonal and rhythmic nuance, and a nervous temperament that could make for rather accident-prone concerts. In her day, many regarded her as the epitome of Mozartian style. She must have enjoyed working with Fricsay, judging by their number of preserved collaborations, both studio and live – including at least three in K 459 alone. However, his conducting does her few favors in the first movement of the same – the tempo slightly too staid; a stolid impression of excessive legato and a general lack of light and shade not making a good foil for Haskil's characteristic understatement. (She also perpetuates an obvious score misprint in the recapitulation of the secondary material – a jarring D instead of the correct high F in bar 318, for those curious.) This movement benefits from living a little more dangerously; for modem-piano versions in the up-to-tempo quick march it really needs, hear Goode/Orpheus (Nonesuch), Kocsis/Budapest Festival (Philips), or Schiff/Salzburg Camerata (Decca). Things improve greatly in the remainder of the concerto, however, the second movement taken at a real Allegretto, and a wonderfully elegant finale incorporating (unusually for its time) a stylish improvised Eingang before the first return of the main theme.

The D-Minor Concerto, K 466, must have been Haskil's single most-performed piece, to judge from the bewildering proliferation of performances on CD. The studio version with Fricsay here has previously appeared on DG, but the new Audite remastering is clearly superior in every way. The performance, however, leaves a rather soft-focused impression, the music's exceptional dramatic qualities recollected in a little too much tranquility (though the subtly varied shadings of the first movement's recurrent solo entry are vintage Haskil). In comparison, the previous day's live performance seems to provide a "shot in the arm" for both Haskil and Fricsay, with a nervous intensity missing from the studio version. Even so, she displays more D-Minor fire in a live 1956 performance with Munch in Boston (Music & Arts, though the harsh sound is a drawback). But the limitations of Haskil's approach are evident if we cast a wider comparison to other pianists from the early-mid 1950s: Serkin/Ormandy (1951, Sony), Lefébure/Casals (1951, Sony), Kraus/Boskovsky (1955, Japanese EMI), Kempff/Karajan (live, 1956, Audite) – all in their different ways offering playing (and conducting) of stronger character and greater dramatic reach.

I've left the best concerto performance for last: Beethoven's Fourth with the under-represented American maestro Dean Dixon. What a difference a conductor can make! Haskil left a number of versions of this concerto between the years 1947 (with Carlo Zecchi for Decca) and 1959 (with Erich Schmid in Beromünster), of which the best conducted are the present version and a 1952 Vienna performance with Karajan (Tahra, but in much less good sound). Dixon's direction is superb – exceptionally alert, with a trenchancy and precision of orchestral execution far above routine, along with an imaginative response to the score's poetry that brings out the best in Haskil, in a performance of radiant long-lined lyricism. This is truly inspired music-making, soloist and conductor reacting to one another in little hair-trigger nuances of timing (for a small but telling example, listen to the turn to minor at the beginning of the first-movement development, the way Haskil reacts to the sudden emotional transformation of the ubiquitous eighth-note upbeat figure, passed from orchestra to soloist – so simple, but the stuff of truly great collaboration). Altogether one of Haskil's best-ever live concerto performances, and alone worth the price of the set.

Schumann's technically undemanding Bunte Blätter finds Haskil in her element, the intimate lyrical impulses conveyed with wonderful spontaneity, even if she is sometimes reluctant to give Schumann's weightier moods their due (by what stretch of the imagination does her Albumblatt No. 4 qualify as "sehr langsam"?). The dazzling Abegg Variations reminds us that her technique was, in its way, the equal of anyone's. Her airborne fantasy in this piece was truly sui generis.

As usual with this series, the recorded sound is stunningly good for its vintage (both studio and live performances), raising the bar for other labels' historical restorations. Indeed, I'm tempted to say that this is now the finest-sounding representation of Haskil's art available. Highly recommended to newcomers and seasoned Haskilians alike.

First impressions can be terrible things. The emotional footprint they have is so formative that it colors our perception of everything that comes after it. That's why a date to which you showed up with a booger blissfully stuck to the tip of your nose so rarely leads to a second one. Or why every Beethoven symphony performance since Toscanini has been a disappointment. (Incidentally, not my view but part of the "Golden Age" attitude found with frightful frequency among critics of a certain generation.)

When your first meaningful encounter with the Shostakovich string quartets was the Borodin Quartet, you are screwed too. The intensity, the roughness, and the overwhelming sense of authenticity (ultimately just a psychological phenomenon): There simply isn't anything that can match that. My impression by the Borodin has been so considerable that I even, perversely, consider scratchy sound and slight distortion part of the desirable "authenticity." Perhaps it helps getting into the dark, dystopian Soviet mood that facilitates our appreciation of these quartets? It's nonsense, of course, but try arguing with perception and feelings, even – or especially – if they are your own.

In any case, there are other quartets that have shown me that the Borodin-only diet is limiting. Most remarkably the Jerusalem Quartet, which live and on record delivers some of the most awesome, most gripping Shostakovich around. Another revelation, more subtle though it has been, are the audiophile recordings of the Mandelring Quartet on Audite SACDs. The sheer beauty of all of Shostakovich's brilliantly harrowing ugliness that these discs – I'm now listening to their cycle's concluding fifth volume, delivered in unrivaled dynamics – is something to behold. It's so good, it might be special even in lesser performances than those the German sibling-based Mandelring Quartet (named after the street they grew up on) claw and pull from the scores of the 11th, 13th, and 15th quartets. Key to that enjoyment – and really to the enjoyment of any DSCH or Bartók quartet listened to on inevitably limiting recording media – is that you listen loud. Very loud. If your neighbors aren't "enjoying" your Shostakovich session, neither will you. The quartets of Shostakovich won't need praise or introduction in these pages – either you admire or love them or you have not heard them live yet. But it helps to appreciate different interpretations to know specifically what distinguishes the three quartets on this volume. For one, they represent an internalization of emotion that takes place in all, but especially the late, Shostakovich quartets. Anger and anguish are there, but suppressed; suffering and sighs are accentuated. Unlike in some of the symphonies (Nos. 10, 11), resignation and resentment are approached with apprehension rather than gusto. Nor is scathing irony (Symphony No. 15) superficially present. That’s what we get in these three quartets: quiet agony and moments of queer humor to the point where I imagine that performers in the USSR must have been chilled upon first playing and discovering them.

One exception to the seething-calm of these three quartets is the harrowingly sudden, jagged opening of the Recitative-Adagio of the 11th quartet, which is ripped into with such joyous ferocity by the Borodin Quartet that it seems difficult to top. The Sorrel Quartet, whose fine Chandos recordings were on hand for convenient comparison, only scratches the surface; literally, from the sound of it. The Jerusalem Quartet incidentally sounds much like the Borodin here, except in Harmonia Mundi's fine sound less direct than Audite's, cleaner than Melodiya's, and closer up front than Chandos's. The Mandelring, parts of whose interpretation on Volume 3 I found too "nice" sounding, won't be outdone this time. The group's slash is yet even more explosive, even as its tone remains, as always, utterly refined. The Scherzo from the same quartet experiences the swiftest clip at the hands of the Jerusalems (2:42), who needle through it like on a sewing machine. Compared to them, the Sorrel (taking 3:17) drags its feet. The Borodins, perhaps uniquely in the Shostakovich cycle, offer a movement I don't consider superior but instead a little wimpy, while the German quartet gets the mix just right, after three bars of establishing the repetitive, perpetuum mobile-like rhythm.

In Fan fare 33:1, Art Lange writes about its fourth volume that the "Mandelring Quartet faithfully reveals the letter but not always the spirit of the score. Their playing is ... blemish free; they are scrupulous in their attention to details like [tempo changes] ... and they present a coherent, unified point of view throughout." The problem with this polite damnation is that, really, all quartets make that impression, compared to the Borodin. But to my ears at least, the Mandelring's carefully considered, always unpredictable ways are a treasure – here and in the other installments. Yes, its performances are polished and meticulous, even immaculate. But its unpredictability – terribly refined one second, ruthlessly vigorous the next – keeps it from being relegated to the lot of "mild mannered" cycles. The dynamic range and fidelity of the Audite recordings, hence the suggestion to turn up the volume, does its part to lift it above much of the competition, even just in plain two-channel CD sound.

Specifically, I prefer this cycle over the Sorrel, St. Petersburg Quartet, and Brodsky Quartet. The Fitzwilliam cycle, to which I am not emotionally wedded, hasn't anything the Borodin doesn't offer me – minus that presumed Russianness. The Emerson's rigid live recordings I've never much liked, and I've heard nothing or too little of the various Manhattan, Danel, Rubio, and Eder cycles to judge. Direct comparison, in any case, is rather tedious when dealing with great music in interpretations that are all above average (because one just wants to keep listening). The direct comparison I've done puts the Mandelring Quartet's cycle, and certainly Volume 5 (my recommended introduction to their cycle), up with the best of the non-Russian Shostakovich interpretations. If I were to shed all but two cycles (and of course I could never), 1 would keep the Borodin cycle on Melodiya and the Mandelring Quartet to cover my bases. The only thing that could change my mind anytime soon would be a hypothetical prospective Jerusalem Quartet traversal.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus Stimme hat auch im 85. Jahr seines Lebens Gewicht....

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus Stimme hat auch im 85. Jahr seines Lebens Gewicht....

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus Stimme hat auch im 85. Jahr seines Lebens Gewicht....

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus Stimme hat auch im 85. Jahr seines Lebens Gewicht....

Seit dem 8. Juni ist Robert Schumann der Jubilar vom Dienst: Sein 200....

Seit dem 8. Juni ist Robert Schumann der Jubilar vom Dienst: Sein 200....

Schon ihre Schubert- und Shostakovich-Aufnahmen konnten voll überzeugen, nun...