Anton Rubinstein: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, Pièces caractéristiques, Op. 50

Album review

The music of Anton Rubinstein is rarely played except for a few short encore-type pieces. He wrote five piano concertos that are not common in the repertory, at least outside Russia, and pianist Anna Shelest, backed by Neeme Järvi and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, have little competition in their complete series. Perhaps it is Shelest's smooth performance, making short work of the Lisztian virtuosity in these pieces, that put this album on classical best-seller lists in the summer of 2023. Maybe it is the quite rare orchestrations of two of his characteristic piano pieces that serve as an entr'acte, but geopolitics might also have had something to do with it. Rubinstein, even more than his successor Tchaikovsky, represented a Western orientation in Russian music, and when one sees Shelest's Ukrainian folk garb, performing together with the national orchestra of a country that may be menaced by Russia, it begins to make up a convincing package. The appeal of these early Rubinstein concertos is that their patterns are Classical, and the composer has a variety of ingenious ways of shoehorning extreme virtuosity into them; Shelest not only hits the notes but also catches the deceptive restraint. She is ideally backed by Järvi's crisp orchestral treatments, and the modest dimensions of the orchestra's hall also work to the music's advantage. It may be that geopolitics will rewrite the repertory a bit, but the truth is that Rubinstein was already due for a bit of a comeback, and Shelest has contributed to that.
© James Manheim /TiVo