The musicianship is impeccable, the material excellent, and the players are among the finest jazz has ever produced. This is an album that positively fizzes with energy. Yet he never leaves you in doubt as to his peerless playing, while Ward Marston’s transfers are another of his masterpieces of restoration. Sadly commercial considerations often triumphed over artistic ones, and much of his time in the studio was taken up by salon music. He also retained a remarkable technique through his later years as shown with the final two tracks, recordings of arrangement of Kreisler’s Liebesfreud, made when he was 52 and then again at 69, the quality of playing being unchanged. We find he had an element of the Baroque inside him which comes in the shape of unaffected readings of parts of Bach’s Third Partita, recorded the year before his death in 1943. At the same time you must recall many of the tracks were recorded when he was sixty-seven, a substantial age in 1940, and as a display of sheer brilliance go to track 10, the second of two Etudes-Tableaux, or the death-defying agility of his adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble-bee, while he unleashes flashing hands in the Gopak from Mussorgsky’s Sorochintsky Fair. Listen to him launch into the central section of the famous C-Sharp minor Prelude, and remember there was no patching of a few bars in 1928. He often treats his own works with a degree of rhythmic freedom that many would now consider as going outside of bounds of good taste. From a technical point of view the playing is quite remarkable and shows that element of risk-taking that must have electrified his audiences. The third volume in Sergey Rachmaninov’s solo piano recordings includes his own works and his arrangements of works by others recorded between 19.
0 kommentar(er)
