Once again these characterful but still woefully under-represented works impress in a program that, back in the mid-1980s (when both performances first appeared) seemed to denote a key strand of the Naxos agenda–to provide rare or previously un-recorded repertoire at bargain price. Works for violin and orchestra by Rubinstein and Cui, played by Takako Nishizaki, feature on this reissue, and they sound as fresh and vital as they did back then. The G major Anton Rubinstein violin concerto is a fine and powerful work, quite as good as many a lesser-known Russian example in the same genre, and easily as deserving of wider currency as, say, the Taneyev Suite de Concert, which is just as rarely heard these days. Nishizaki gives a committed and polished reading, though you often feel that this is music written by a pianist who had marginally less facility when writing for the violin. Still, here’s a well-schooled performance, full of agreeable touches of imagination (the Andante shows Nishizaki’s fine-spun tone to particularly good effect) delivered with crisply economical urgency that makes good musical sense even of the work’s plainer and less idiomatic passages.
Another rarity is César Cui’s charming if rather derivative Suite Concertante, again very nicely played and decently recorded, too, though Nishizaki received rather better sound engineering in Hong Kong’s Tsuen Wan Town Hall in 1984 than she did a year later in Bratislava for the Rubinstein. The Suite Concertante performance originally came from a useful compilation of Cui’s works directed by Kenneth Schermerhorn on Marco Polo. A warm welcome back to the catalog for both works! [5/20/2001]
