The second of three volumes covering Mischa Levitzki’s complete recordings picks up from the six electrical HMV titles that close Volume 1, starting with the pianist’s compellingly straightforward and technically finished 1933 Schumann G minor sonata. Collectors have long prized this recording, and with good reason. Levitzki makes most of his interpretive points through color and voicing rather than with tempo fluctuation, and he heeds the first movement’s step-wise bass notes and implied inner voices. The slow movement’s eloquent understatement and virtual lack of rubato couldn’t be more different from the metrical leeway Percy Grainger takes in his more outwardly ardent recording made a few years earlier.
I’m less convinced by Levitzki’s tendency to lurch into the Liszt E-flat concerto’s unaccompanied passages, to say nothing of Landon Ronald’s raggedy orchestral accompaniment. Levitzki’s only concerto recording was the first electrically recorded version of this warhorse, and to my mind it’s superceded by subsequent accounts from Gieseking/Wood and Sauer/Weingartner. Three Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies (Nos. 6, 12, & 13) are more notable for their unruffled cool than for the rhetorical freedom you hear, for example, in Liszt pupil Arthur de Greef’s nearly contemporaneous recording of No. 12. Although the two takes of La Campanella are a bit better than Levitzky’s heavy-handed 1925 acoustic version, they don’t hold a candle to Ignaz Friedman’s staggering Columbia traversal. Similarly, the shellac era offered more vibrant, soaring Liszt Un Sospiros (Egon Petri and Frederic Lamond, to name but two), while Levitzki doesn’t match the suppleness and ease Rachmaninov and Hoffman brought to Moskowski’s La Jongleuse. No question, though, that Levitzki played his own charming, salonish A major Waltz exactly as it should go.
Ward Marston’s transfers are cleanly processed, yet they don’t match the fullness, dynamic presence, and timbral definition I hear in most of these titles via Bryan Crimp’s far more expensive edition for APR. Naxos’ budget price, however, will sway pianophiles as much as the promise of some bonafide rarities on the third and final volume.
