Here is an enterprising issue and no mistake—an essential library acquisition, irrespective of the quality of the music or the performances.
It is clear that Rachmaninov's opera based on Maeterlinck's play Monna Vanna was a project close to his heart. He worked on it in Dresden in 1906-7, at the same time as the First Piano Sonata and the Second Symphony. The First Act was completed in piano score, but the Second and Third were left unfinished when it turned out that the rights of setting had been given to the Frenchman Henri Fevrier.
The story is of the defence of Pisa in the fifteenth century and the rage of Guido, commander of the garrison, when his wife Giovanna agrees to offer herself to the Florentine leader. The completed act is in the kind of accompanied recitative style that Russians from Dargomizhsky (The Stone Guest) to Shostakovich (The Gamblers) have adopted from time to time. Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande shows that the conversational idiom can be made to work, but whilst there are many unmistakably personal harmonic touches, and Igor Buketoff's orchestration is appropriately dark-hued, I hear little in the music of Monna Vanna to suggest that it would have had much future on the stage. The frisson at the beginning of the Third Scene (Guido and Vanna's confrontation) is very much the exception.
It has to be said that the English translation sounds stilted and that of the vocal soloists only Sherrill Milnes is anything like adequate. In the circumstances it would be unwise to judge the music too harshly. In any case, a workshop performance such as this gives at least a useful general impression of the work. For that, and for Buketoff's dedicated work of restoration, we should be grateful.
His sleeve-note understandably stresses his personal contact with Rachmaninov and the latter's special attachment to the opera—as he says, it was the only major work the composer put in his suitcase when he left Russia at the end of 1917. It should also perhaps have been added that the creative tide had ebbed well before the rights of setting were denied (Barrie Martyn tells the whole story in his recent biography—Scolar Press: 1990).
More seriously, Buketoff is economical with his information on the versions of the Fourth Piano Concerto. What he has recorded is essentially the version published in 1928 by Editions Tair in Paris. The score is a rarity, and I am still trying to hunt down a copy, but I understand that Buketoff has also incorporated various changes of orchestration mentioned to him by Rachmaninov. This 1927 version had already been shorn of some 114 bars since the disastrously received first performances earlier in that year. In the definitive 1941 score, the one we hear nowadays, Rachmaninov cut a further 78 bars, extensively rewrote the later stages of the finale (adding a cyclic return of the first movement climax), and made many smaller adjustments of texture. Full details are available in Geoffrey Norris and Robert Threlfall's A catalogue of the compositions of S. Rachmaninoff (Scolar Press: 1982); they would have enhanced the value of the disc had they been repeated here. I also feel that Buketoff's special pleading on behalf of the 1927 version is unhelpful. Better surely just to stress how interesting it is to hear alternative thoughts in a composition that is problematic in all its guises but no less moving for that. It would be just as instructive to hear the original version in its entirety (assuming that the material still exists).
It cannot be said that the Iceland Symphony Orchestra distinguish themselves in the way that the Lahti Symphony Orchestra did in their BIS recording of the 'original' Sibelius Violin Concerto. Despite Chandos's overblown recording they sound generally thin in tone, and the piano is backwardly placed and rather tinny, making it difficult to give a just assessment of William Black (he sounds able but uninspired). Buketoff claims that Rachmaninov preferred a slower-than-breakneck pace for the finale—that is hardly borne out by the latter's RCA recording, and as delivered here the music sounds urgently in need of a shot in the arm.'