Levant Plays Rubinstein and Liszt

There has been a revival of interest in Oscar Levant's recordings on the music blogs and sharing sites lately, and I've done my part with a number of posts already. Today that continues with Levant's rendition of Anton Rubinstein's Piano Concerto No. 4.

The Rubinstein work has the dubious distinction of being of being perhaps the best-known of the "forgotten" Romantic war-horse concertos. Seldom if ever performed live, it has nonetheless been the subject of at least 10 commercial recordings, beginning with this  March 1952 date with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New Yorkers. It was followed in just a few months by a Friedrich Wührer session in Vienna for Vox.

Caricature by David Levine

In truth, the concerto does deserve its semi-renown. It boasts a number of memorable themes, which the composer give a vigorous if not rigorous workout. Levant is just the right keyboard athlete for the task, betraying not a hint of the irony that was integral to his public personality on the radio or in films.

As a bonus I've included two pieces from the pianist's 1955 Liszt collection - the Sonetto del Petrarca No. 104 and the Valse Oubliée No. 1 in F-sharp Minor. My transfer comes from the 1960s Odyssey reissue of the Rubinstein concerto, where they were included as filler. (The 1955 LP, which I do not own, also included a selection of Hungarian Rhapsodies.)

For the Rubinstein, I transferred the first two movements from the original pressing, and switched to the reissue for the third movement because of groove damage on the earlier disc. The first issue is marginally more present in sound, but there isn't much difference, and overall the sonics are excellent, as is often the case with recordings from Columbia's 30th Street Studios in New York.