The first thing to say about this historically interesting set is that it cannot be judged according to criteria normally associated with record reviewing. Nor should it be. Competitions inhabit a unique performing category built on a very specific set of technical and musical requirements. Generally speaking, the bottom line ‘on the night’ is more to demonstrate than to interpret, and I would be amazed if the featured finalists consider their winning performances during the 50-year-old Queen Elisabeth Competition, where piano and violin ‘years’ alternate, to be anything other than transitory triumphs. Exciting, perhaps. Stressful, certainly. But are they worthy of being listened to again and again? I very much doubt it. Which makes this release more suitable for libraries and musical institutions – all of which should invest in a copy – than for private collectors.
To be honest, listening through from discs 1 to 12 has proved exhausting, even though I extended the auditioning process over a few days. So much of the playing is uncomfortably frenetic. Only Leonid Kogan, the first-prize winner for 1951, is represented by a snippet from a commercial recording (the cadenza from Paganini’s First Concerto). The rest were taped at the finals, the semi-finals or at laureates’ recitals. That Berl Senofsky (first, 1955), who is sensitive but slightly tremulous in Debussy’s Violin Sonata, should have triumphed over the second-prize-winning Julian Sitkovetsky (a brilliant Ysaye Op 27 No 6) is a little perplexing, to say the least. Leon Fleisher (1952) earned his ‘first’ with Brahms’s First Concerto, ably conducted by Weingartner-pupil Franz Andre and a volatile – if messy – prototype for his superb stereo commercial recording under Szell (Sony, 4/98). In a sense, it typifies the musical shortcomings of a set where impulse and brilliance outlaw the repose needed for a more durable interpretation.
Vladimir Ashkenazy (first, 1956) despatches Liszt’s First Concerto (again under Andre) with more digital dexterity than perceptive musicianship (it’s not really ‘his’ piece) while at one point in the first movement of Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto Evgeny Moguilevsky (first, 1964) stops, hesitates, then starts again. A strange performance, this, static in part or suddenly barnstorming but with no overall shape.
And what has become of violinist Alexei Michlin who, in 1963, played Shostakovich’s First Concerto with such unstinting passion? True, his inton-ation sometimes wanders and, for our purposes, Andre Cluytens’s sensitive Belgian National Orchestra accompaniment borders on inaudibility, but the solo playing has real character and more than justifies its winning status.
Gidon Kremer (third, 1967 – that’s a laugh!) shows his conspicuous musical superiority from the first bar of Schumann’s late Fantasie to the last, but you can sense he’s not exactly at ease. Neither is the late Philippe Hirshhorn (first, 1967), a fiery player who pushes tension to near-discomfort in Ravel’s Tzigane.
Reading that Mitsuko Uchida had come tenth in 1968 initially made me roar, until I heard her unexpectedly rigid Beethoven Third Concerto, deemed suitable for inclusion but to these ears hardly worth bothering with. By contrast, the Lebanese pianist Abdel-Rahman El-Bacha (first, 1978) provides a feast of controlled tone painting in Prokofiev’s Second Concerto, a memorable solo performance indifferently conducted by Georges Octors. Edith Volckaert (fifth, 1971) rather overdoes the heat in Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto though her performance is worth hearing for the sake of Michael Gielen’s considered conducting.
Much fuss was made of the curiously arrogant Pierre-Alain Volondat (first, 1983) though I personally can’t hear that his Brahms Ballades warranted more praise than, say, Mikhail Faerman’s energetic first prize-winning Tchaikovsky B flat minor of 1975. Stranger still is Valery Afanassiev’s largely unmannered Schubert Op 120, which won him first prize in 1972, especially when viewed in the light of his massively distended Schubert recordings for Denon. The late Yuri Egorov’s brilliant third prize-winning Schumann Carnaval (1975) appears to have taken its lead from Rachman-inov’s famous recording of the work, and I was very impressed by the musical qualities of Ekaterina Novitskaja’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which earned her first prize in 1968.
Performances by pianists Frank Braley (first, 1991), Markus Groh (first, 1995) and Vitaly Samoshko (first, 1999) are worth a listen, say, once apiece. But I wouldn’t mind hanging on to Miriam Fried’s 1971 Sibelius Concerto, Vadim Repin’s 1989 Tchaikovsky Concerto and Nikolaj Znaider’s 1997 Ysaye Op 27 No 2, all of them impressively musical and thoroughly deserving of their first prizes. A twelfth disc marks the recently inaugurated singers’ category, with mezzo Marie-Nicole Lemieux (first, 2000) as its star attraction.
As to the rest (I have not had the space to mention all the featured finalists), there are of course the ‘competition concertos’. Works by Poot, Devreese and van Rossum are of some interest whereas Milhaud’s lengthy and taxing Concert Royal provided Jaime Laredo with an ungrateful if ultimately profitable challenge. Laredo won his first prize in 1959.
The set’s presentation is superior to its documentation, which should surely have included a list of prize-winners from 1951 to the present day. The sound quality is variable, though mostly good enough, and the transfers are adequate. It seems almost unfair that youngsters who had already submitted to the judgements of a grim-faced jury should now have to suffer the hasty assessment of a record reviewer, some of them posthumously. But, as I suggested at the head of this review, the competitive element of this set is limited to the actual competition. It’s a memento, an interesting historical document, and on no account should it be valued as anything more