****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Leon Fleisher made two studio recordings of Maurice Ravel's Concerto for Piano, Left Hand Alone, of which the finer performance is this one (on Vanguard's CD) which Sergiu Comissiona conducts. The other (Sony Classical SK-47-188) has Fleisher in harness with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as that hunk of deadwood drifting in the tide, Seiji Ozawa conducts it.The Fleisher/Commissiona recording is by far the better performance, with by turns voluptuously lovely, poetically evocative, and jazzily snazzy playing from the Baltimore ensemble under Comissiona's cunning direction. Fleisher plays better, too, with those Baltimore forces, which supply a much more atmospheric and colourful accompaniment under Sergiu Comissiona's inspired and poetic direction. Their collaboration with Fleisher Fleisher favourably with the sonic sludge that Ozawa draws, oozing gooily, from the B.S.O. (that abbreviation applying potentially to both orchestras, but being more widely recognised as standing for "Boston Symphony Orchestra" than as one indicating the Baltimore ensemble).Leon Fleischer always has been an astute and highly virtuosic pianist. Fortunately, while he was lacking the use of his right hand, he continued to record piano works for left hand only as he had the opportunity, such as the other recordings on that later Ozawa-led CD from 1990 (matching the Ravel concerto with a left hand work by Sir Benjamin Britten) and 1991 (the left hand concerto by Serge Prokofiev on the same CD). This has been a boon to the record catalogues, for Fleisher's piano left-hand work has been of extraordinary quality, possibly the best in such repertory. He already had been one of the very greatest and most artistic, rigourously musical and intellectual keyboard players of the 20th century before fate made him turn to the repertory for left hand alone.Fleisher and Comissiona simply enchant the listener on their Vanguard recording of the concerto by Ravel, whereas the 1990 recording under Ozawa's direction just lumbers along by comparison. The tempi are faster and tauter, to marvellously invigourating effect, on the 1982 Vanguard recording, whereas the 1990 performance, trudging and plodding along like a musical pachyderm, never really quite gets fully into gear. By comparison with Vanguard's Fleisher/Comissiona recording, the sound of both the orchestra and piano on Sony's recording pairing Fleisher with Ozawa seems like an insufficiently detailed blur, downright blowzy for the orchestra; as for the piano or, perhaps, the way that the instrument was recorded, there is a distinct difference between the clarity and tonally varied timbre of the piano that Fleisher used for the Vanguard recording, an instrument so completely suited to this quintessentially French music, and the rich but excessively rotund, monochromatic sound of the instrument which the soloist plays on the Sony recording, one that probably is better suited to some German and English music than it is to French or Slavic repertory.The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, for Vanguard, covers itself in glory as Sergiu Comissiona so skillfully leads it to such delectable effect. The orchestral sound there is clear, replete with seasoning as well as juice, and gloriously colourful. Compare Baltimore's exquisite results to what the Boston Symphony Orchestra delivers under Ozawa's baton. Before Ozawa had succeeded, as he desired and intended, to destroy the special character of that ensemble, considered widely as the best French orchestra in the world (even if, ironically, it was not not in a country of "La Francophonie"), that great Bostonian musical institution excelled in French and Russian repertoire, as Sergei Koussevitzky, Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, and Erich Leinsdorf at the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra so brilliantly documented, nearly always in the exceedingly good sound (for their respective dates) as R.C.A.'s recording studios captured it. In "blanding down" the B.S.O.'s musical character, resulting in it becoming "just another" generic-sounding musical formation of the kind.While the Boston orchestra has suffered a dismally downward trajectory under Ozawa, the orchestra in Baltimore has been making a remarkable upward ascent, as one can hear for oneself in all of the works by Ravel included on Vanguard's treasurable disc. The Baltimore orchestra under Comissiona never sounded better in its recorded history and that orchestra, in fact, is a first rank choice to accompany such a great artist as Leon Fleisher in Ravel's music. Enjoy the results of their collaboration in Ravel's concerto on Vanguard's CD!
