Kabalevsky’s piano concertos have been well served on disc recently, with new recordings on Naxos and Chandos. The First concerto is the most ambitious, a bit long for its material, and heavily influenced by Prokofiev (his Second concerto, but without the spice). After this piece, the other three concertos become more concise, closer in style to (say) the Second concerto of Shostakovich. In other words, the music is colorful, tuneful, and completely “Socialist Realist”, but it’s good, clean fun and it’s helped immeasurably by Michael Korstick’s light, brilliant, and effervescent way with the piano parts. Along with the always reliable Alun Francis, the First concerto sounds unusually cohesive, while the original 1935 version of the Second comes off as a major statement.
The complete Kabalevsky music for piano and orchestra includes the equally tuneful Rhapsody, and a wonderful surprise: an arrangement of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor D. 940 for piano four hands as a full-fledged piano concerto (complete with an interpolated cadenza in the finale). This work has been transcribed for orchestra by several different hands, notably Ernst Rudorff and Felix Mottl, but this arrangement is by far the most successful even if, or perhaps because, Kabalevsky provides a fully modern orchestration and doesn’t try to recapture Schubert’s own idiosyncratic scoring. The result is completely successful as an individual work of art in its own right and a real find; you can hear the start of the finale in the sound sample attached. Excellent engineering makes this two-disc set a thoroughly recommendable proposition.
