Search - Johannes Brahms, Aaron Copland, Edward MacDowell :: 1st & 2nd Cliburn Competitions, 1962/1966

PLAY IT AGAIN, VAN

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 09/11/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The international piano competitions have a great deal of atmosphere and `buzz' about them, not to mention a great deal of politics like any other sport. Van Cliburn was the first non-Russian to win the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, and when the prize in the next of those seemed inevitably to be going to Ogdon the Soviet authorities pressed a reluctant Ashkenazy into entering to split the award with him. The reclusive Cliburn founded his own event in Fort Worth, and this disc contains a selection of the entries for the first two of the series in 1962 and 1966. Recorded material appears to be thin on the ground, and the only complete work of any great length here is the Copland sonata played by gold medallist Ralph Votapek in 1962. The other contributions are from Lupu, gold medallist in 1966, and from Nicolai Petrov who was apparently silver medallist in that year, although the liner-note tells us at another point that that award went to Barry Lee Snyder.



Of the three, Lupu has made the big time and deservedly so, and my impression is that the other two have not. Votapek starts very well with a movement from one of the MacDowell sonatas, displaying a big tone at the start and a lot of sensitivity and sympathy to this slightly reactionary music later. In any case it's pleasant to hear anything by MacDowell these days other than To a Wild Rose. In the three Brahms numbers from op118 there are more wrong notes than I would expect to hear from a gold medallist in any of the more recent competitions, but they are agreeably played, showing a good sense of the composer's idiom and some real originality in the clog-dance effect that he gives to the rhythm of the ballade. The Copland sonata is proficiently done, with faster speeds in the outer movements than Peter Lawson adopts, but I can't really find this performance to be any kind of rival to Lawson's in any respect at all.



From Petrov we get two Scarlatti sonatas plus another movement from one by MacDowell - all goodish but hardly outstanding to my own way of thinking. Whether or not hindsight comes into the matter, I start to get a genuine sense of occasion when Lupu takes the stage with the first movement of the second Prokofiev concerto. The orchestral contribution is not helped by a very indifferent piece of recording, but I was interested to hear Lupu in this music by way of a change from the Schubert and Mozart in which I know him better. Even in Schubert I have found flashes of real and even startling power at times as well as the lyric beauty of touch for which Lupu is more renowned, and his reading here has real stature and a commanding quality to it.



The recorded sound is never better than good average and not always even that. There is naturally applause from the audiences (I wouldn't have felt I was getting my money's worth without it), and they seem to contain a considerable number of sufferers from pulmonary afflictions, but I guess that's all part of the atmosphere too. Absolutely nothing on this disc could even remotely be called essential for anyone's collection. This is a temps-perdu job, for the nostalgia market, and I enjoy it simply on that basis."