Khachaturian: Piano Concerto in D-Flat Major & Concerto-Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra

Album review

Although the first performance of Khatchaturian's Piano Concerto took place in the open air (!) in a bandstand in a Moscow park (!) on a broken-down piano (!), played by none other than Lev Oborine (!), after a single rehearsal (!), triumph came only a few months later, when the composer was given the keys to the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. In less than five years, the Concerto would be played in New York and Boston, by stars like William Kapell or Oscar Levant; and eventually it would achieve a global fame which persists to this day. The work spills over with accents (real or imagined) of the writer's native Armenia. Rather later, once he was famous, Khatchaturian would compose three "concerto-rhapsodies" of one movement: one for Kogan's violin, another for Rostropovich's cello, and the third in 1968 for Nikolai Petrov's piano, with Roshdestvensky conducting. This is no longer a work of early maturity: rather, it is very much in the composer's definitive style, which "absorbed" his great contemporaries, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, while retaining the Caucasian borrowings and the orchestral language which was then in vogue in the Soviet Union. A powerfully original work, it hides neither its desire to please the crowds nor its aim to satisfy the more demanding listeners in terms of virtuosity, complex harmony, counterpoint, and rich orchestration. For this album, Stepan Simonian takes to the piano, a winner of competitions like Iturbi, the Yerevan Khatchaturian Competition and the Bach Competition in Leipzig. © SM/Qobuz