Piatigorsky’s RCA Chamber Music Recordings

It has taken me well over a month to cover all of the chamber music performances in the RCA portion of the collection Gregor Piatigorsky: The Art of the Cello. To be fair, this was the largest of the three segments that partitioned my coverage of this collection, as I had explained when I began writing about this collection this past November. The fact is that chamber music is the “mother lode” of the entire collection; and almost all of the recordings in that “mother lode” had a significant history even before this omnibus collection was released.

That history owes much to the presence of violinist Jascha Heifetz. The lion’s share of the chamber music in this portion involves recordings I had already encountered in RCA’s Heifetz Collection, which was released in 1996. However, the significance of that sector of the collection reaches back to 1963, the year of the 5th Annual GRAMMY Awards. That was the year in which the “Best Classical Performance - Chamber Music” award was given to The Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts With Primrose, Pennario and Guests. (I have to wonder what Arthur Rubinstein thought of being relegated to the “and Guests” category!) Indeed, there is a good chance that this is the largest box set to achieve GRAMMY recognition; and the CD version is available with a single CD for each of the albums, all of whose covers are displayed on the back of the box:

from the Amazon.com Web page

The bottom line is that the original box of LPs was the result of recording sessions that had begun in 1950, and further sessions would be recorded after that GRAMMY had been awarded. This is a rich collection of chamber music, no matter how you cut it, which is why I am willing to wax hyperbolic with phrases such as “mother lode!” Charles William Eliot may have had his “Five Foot Shelf” of books that every reader should know, eventually published as the Harvard Classics; but the joint efforts of Heifetz and Piatigorsky constitute the five-foot shelf of chamber music.

Mind you, there are Piatigorsky performances without Heifetz that cannot be ignored. In 1966 he recorded both of the sonatas by Johannes Brahms with Rubinstein as his pianist. However, there are also lesser known sonatas that definitely deserve attention. Indeed, there are two recordings of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 119 sonata in C major (composed for Mstislav Rostropovich), one made in 1953 with Ralph Berkowitz and the other from 1965 sessions with Rudolf Firkušný, which also included Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 65 sonata in G minor. The other session that particularly interested me was another Berkowitz session in 1956 at which Paul Hindemith’s E major sonata and Samuel Barber’s Opus 6 sonata in C minor were recorded.

Thus, without dismissing the virtues of the entire Piatigorsky collection, when it comes to chamber music, this box set provides many hours (literally) of chamber music listening; and those hours are as informative as they are expressive.