Friday, November 23, 2018

Piatigorsky’s Early Years Recording with Columbia

1945 photograph of cellist Gregor Piatigorsky (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

A little over a month ago Sony Music Entertainment released their latest anthology based on the significant and substantial archival material now available to the organization. The title of the collection is Gregor Piatigorsky: The Art of the Cello, and it consists of all of the recordings that this cellist made for both Columbia and RCA. Piatigorsky’s name will probably be familiar to those who have already encountered RCA’s Heifetz Collection (released in 1996) and/or Rubinstein Collection (remastered in 1999), neither of which are currently available. Personally, I have been waiting for a “Piatigorsky collection” for several years, simply because I wished to account for his achievements beyond his partnerships with such luminaries as Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein.

We often overlook the fact that the twentieth century was the first century in which documentary records of musical performance could be compiled with results that could, for the most part, be faithful to the technical skills of the performers. Furthermore, due to the Russian Revolution and Adolf Hitler’s attempts to conquer all of Europe, it was “the best of times” to bring such artists into contact with the first serious generations of engineers working in audio recording technology. Furthermore, thanks to both Hitler and Joseph Stalin, some of the best of Europe’s musical talent gravitated to Los Angeles, where the film industry provided a home base for most of those engineers. Thus, this wealth of archival material owes much to the right people being in the same place at the same time.

Of the 36 CDs in the Piatigorsky collection, 28 contain the recordings that were recorded and released by RCA. That leaves eight CDs, the first seven of which were released by Columbia. The eighth seems to have been produced under the Vox Cum Laude label. Most of the content of these recordings comes from the time when Piatigorsky was head of the cello department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia between 1941 and 1949. Thus, he did not become part of the musical life in Los Angeles until several years after the end of World War II. At that time he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California and remained there until his death at the age of 73 on August 6, 1976.

This article will focus on those first eight CDs, dividing the RCA releases into concertante and chamber music categories. As might be guessed, one cannot get very comprehensive with only eight CDs; but they certainly provide an introduction to the sort of music that Piatigorsky favored. As might be guessed, his repertoire was not as adventurous as the sorts of compositions associated with the chronicles in Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s book, Evenings On and Off the Roof. Indeed, Crawford’s sources have almost nothing to say about the fact that Heifetz, Rubinstein, and Piatigorsky (often along with violist William Primrose) offered Los Angeles music lovers a much more familiar repertoire of chamber music. (I was somewhat amused to see that, in The Doctor Faustus Dossier, the only thing mentioned about Heifetz and Piatigorsky is that they were neighbors of Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann!) Indeed, one of Crawford’s sources even went as far as to take Piatigorsky to task for his failure to include Zoltán Kodály’s solo cello sonata in his repertoire!

On a more positive side the author of Piatigorsky’s Wikipedia page quotes Richard Strauss on having conducted Piatigorsky in a performance of his Opus 35 tone poem “Don Quixote.” Strauss supposedly declared, after the slow variation in D minor, that Piatigorsky had evoked “Don Quixote as I imagined him.” Sadly, we do not have a recording of that performance; but Columbia did record Piatigorsky playing “Don Quixote” with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra back when it was conducted by Fritz Reiner. Given that I have often felt that Reiner knew more about conducting Strauss than Strauss did, that would make this particular CD in the collection one of the most valuable! Similarly, I would argue that the recording of Piatigorsky playing Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 104 cello concerto in B minor with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra made for a particularly memorable experience. (To be fair, however, I grew up in Philadelphia during the Ormandy years; so my reaction may well be one of nostalgia.)

On the chamber music side it almost seems as it the Columbia producers wanted to record “a little of this and a little of that” in that same “middle-brow” spirit that looms over so many of their recordings of pianist Oscar Levant. On the other hand I have to confess that Piatigorsky’s recording of Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 65 sonata in G minor is not only one of the most coherent I have encountered but also, more often than not, downright compelling. This may not be a “sonata for the ages;” but, playing with pianist Ralph Berkowitz, Piatigorsky went a long way to making it sound that way! As to whether or not Piatigorsky’s spirit should be taken to task for having neglected the Kodály sonata, I was more than a little surprised to discover that he had recorded Anton Webern’s Opus 11 set of three little pieces with pianist Charles Rosen!

As might be guessed, much of the fun on the chamber music side arises once Heifetz is in the picture. Thus, we have what is probably the earliest recording of the two of them playing “Suite italienne.” This was Piatigorsky’s own arrangement of selections from Igor Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “Pulcinella.” Ironically, the Stravinsky selection is on the same CD as the Webern. It would be nice to fantasize about Piatigorsky have helped Stravinsky to get his head around Webern’s music; but the truth is that the Webern pieces were recorded in March of 1972, almost a year after Stravinsky’s death in April of 1971!

Thus, while RCA has the lion’s share of the recordings that Piatigorsky made, there is much to appreciate in the first eight CDs of this recent Sony release.

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