Document

  1987
    March 1987
        Instrumental
                Brahms Piano Works.

Brahms Seven Fantasies, Op. 116. Three Intermezzos, Op. 117. Six Piano [Piece] Pieces, Op. 118. Four Piano [Piece] Pieces, Op. 119. Mikhail Rudy (pf).

EMI (Full price) (CD) CDC7 47556-2 (72 minutes).

The slender accompanying booklet includes a photo of Mikhail Rudy (and a very personable young man he looks too) but no biographical information. However, I discovered from EMI that after winning the Marguerite Long Contest in 1975, at 22, he decided to leave the USSR (where he studied at the Moscow Conservatoire with Jakob Flier) and to adopt French citizenship. His playing won him warm encouragement from the late Arthur Rubinstein. Such information might have served a more useful purpose than Andre Tubeuf's booklet essay entitled "Late Brahms, or 'the irruption of transparency'". Even in the French language I've rarely encountered more self-indulgent fantasy.

As for Rudy, he struck me as a sympathetically musical Brahmsian, eager in response to the Florestan in the composer's make-up, but a little too inclined to withdraw into dreams, or should I say, to sleep-walk, in the slower, more intimate pieces. Several of these, not least Op. 117 No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 118 No. 6 in E flat minor and Op. 119 No. 1 in B minor need greater inner intensity, more personally motivated phrasing. As yet he does not quite manage to convey that a lifetime's bitter-sweetness is compressed into each—and I say this despite has immediate quickening of pulse (it should surely be more gradual) in response to their middle-section gleams of hope. Tempo is once or twice questionable elsewhere, such as his very leisurely approach to the main theme of Op. 118 No. 5 in F, marked Andante. And is there enough Viennese lilt in the andantino grazioso episodes of Op. 119 No. 2 in E minor?

In sum, then, a sincere, unaffected musician who I look forward to hearing again. But for all his promise, I can't help feeling that he has not yet made all these concentrated late miniatures wholly his own. the recording itself is agreeably mellow except for an occasional clanginess in stormier outbursts.

JOC



		The slender accompanying booklet includes a photo of Mikhail Rudy (and a very personable young man he looks too) but no biographical information. However, I discovered from EMI that after winning the Marguerite Long Contest in 1975, at 22, he decided to leave the USSR (where he studied at the Moscow Conservatoire with Jakob Flier) and to adopt French citizenship. His playing won him warm encouragement from the late Arthur Rubinstein. Such information might have served a more useful purpose than Andre Tubeuf's booklet essay entitled "Late Brahms, or 'the irruption of transparency'". Even in the French language I've rarely encountered more self-indulgent fantasy.



		As for Rudy, he struck me as a sympathetically musical Brahmsian, eager in response to the Florestan in the composer's make-up, but a little too inclined to withdraw into dreams, or should I say, to sleep-walk, in the slower, more intimate pieces. Several of these, not least Op. 117 No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 118 No. 6 in E flat minor and Op. 119 No. 1 in B minor need greater inner intensity, more personally motivated phrasing. As yet he does not quite manage to convey that a lifetime's bitter-sweetness is compressed into each—and I say this despite has immediate quickening of pulse (it should surely be more gradual) in response to their middle-section gleams of hope. Tempo is once or twice questionable elsewhere, such as his very leisurely approach to the main theme of Op. 118 No. 5 in F, marked Andante. And is there enough Viennese lilt in the andantino grazioso episodes of Op. 119 No. 2 in E minor?



		In sum, then, a sincere, unaffected musician who I look forward to hearing again. But for all his promise, I can't help feeling that he has not yet made all these concentrated late miniatures wholly his own. the recording itself is agreeably mellow except for an occasional clanginess in stormier outbursts.