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John Browning's debut recording from 1958 - and more

Discophage | France | 08/19/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Nice to have John Browning's debut recording back on CD - and more. Recorded in July and August 1958 - Browning had just won the Gold medal in the Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels, and various other prizes -, it first came out on LP in February 1959 as Capitol P (mono) or SP (stereo) 8464. This present reissue was made by EMI in their valuable "Full Dimensional Sound" series in 1999 - alas now all but gone. Someone seems to have a batch of this particular CD and is selling them for cheap on the famous auction site, and I took advantage.



The recital is enjoyable - no "big" sonata but, other than Rimsky's Flight of the Bumblebee in Rachmaninoff's transcription, no small trifling "encore" either - and seems to me played well enough. I particularly enjoyed the fact that Browning doesn't try and "milk" it: he keeps it rather cool and disciplined and doesn't give the impression that he's got to say it all in just one piece. Other than that, I won't risk a more involved interpretive comment, as I haven't done thorough comparative listening on these pieces. Good remastering, present stereo sound, with moderate and unobtrusive tape hiss.



And here is the plus, and it is quite substantial: Schubert's Impromptu D 899/4 and Bach's Partita n°2, taken from a live recital (a few coughs and concluding applause included) given in New York a few months after the LP recording, in March 1959. The sound is slightly more distant but still clear, and with rather less tape hiss.



Someone wasn't looking when the booklet was printed. The liner notes seem to be the direct reproduction from the notes of the original LP, period. Browning's career seems to end abruptly around the end of 1957, only the compositions from the LP are described, and no information whatsoever is given of the origin of the two excerpts from the live recital. The back page also presents an add for four more releases in the "Full Dimensional Sound" series, with photos of the covers, which allows you to see that the caption for Brahms' Violin Concerto and Symphony #3 (Milstein, Steinberg) is wrong (it has Brahms Piano Concerto #1 and Schubert Unfinished Symphony, whose cover photo is displayed just above, with the same - and correct this time - caption).



I'm not complaining: it is a small cost for a well-filled disc of 70+ minutes.

"