Profil Releases “First Recordings” of Ashkenazy

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past Sunday this site reported on the ten-CD album of orchestral music conducted by George Szell as one of the most recent releases of an archival collection by Profil. That release took place on the same day as another Profil release, entitled Vladimir Ashkenazy: The First Recordings. During his piano studies at the Moscow Conservatory, Ashkenazy was the youngest of the five Soviet pianists allowed to travel to Warsaw to take place in the 1955 International Chopin Piano Competition. He won second prize, which probably facilitated his travel to Brussels the following year to vie in the Queen Elisabeth Competition, where he was awarded the first prize.

The earliest recordings in the Profil collection were made at that Warsaw competition. All of the other performances appear to be studio recordings made between 1957 and 1961. Most of the recordings were made in Moscow, and the lion’s share of repertoire in this collection consists of works by Frédéric Chopin. However, there are also recording sessions in Berlin that account for other composers. These include two sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, Opus 53 (“Waldstein”) in C major and Opus 111 in C minor, two selections by Franz Liszt, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 42 set of variations on a theme attributed (mistakenly) to Arcangelo Corelli, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 83 (seventh) sonata in B-flat major.

Unless I am mistaken, my first acquisition of an Ashkenazy CD was the Decca release of the complete Chopin études, the Opus 10 and Opus 25 sets of twelve, all of which fill a single disc. The recordings on that CD are distinctively “mature” performances recorded in 1975 and 1984, respectively; and I was definitely impressed with the facility and expressiveness that Ashkenazy brought to his interpretations. The Profil collection also accounts for all of the études, but the recording sessions were not quite as systematic. All the recordings were made in Moscow. Opus 10 was recorded in 1959, but the Opus 25 études were recorded at sessions in both 1959 and 1960. These recordings make it clear that Ashkenazy already had full command of expressive rhetoric at these earlier dates.

Nevertheless, this collection never really made me sit up and take notice the way the Szell collection did. Thus, while Ashkenazy could bring expressiveness to Chopin selections we have all encountered too often to be enumerated, his accounts of Beethoven and Prokofiev tended to fall short of anything beyond a solid technical command. I would venture a guess that Ashkenazy’s rhetoric may well have been heavily controlled until his permanent departure from the Soviet Union in 1963. Thus, these early efforts may serve primarily to suggest the paths that he wished to follow once he had freed himself of authoritarian influences.