Pabst Revisited

[terry martyn]

I was recently listening once more to the Marshev CD and thinking to myself that I would love to hear this fine concerto in the concert hall (Brull´s op.88 is at the top of my wishlist there, but that´s for another day). Dismissed as frivolous, the final movement is poignant to my ears. Does anyone know whether there is truth in the story that Pabst was so put off by the reaction of the critics that he decided never to orchestrate anything again?

[Ilja]

There is also an interesting live recording with Paniagotis Trochopoulos on Cameo classics which, truth be told, I a bit more rewarding than the Marshev in a number of respects (despite the less-than-stellar orchestral playing).

[terry martyn]

I also have that CD. The pianist has verve.    But if you can get past the lumbering orchestra in the first movement, you fall foul of the sound engineer in the wistful passage in the finale.

[Ilja]

Agreed - those were the "respects" I found less rewarding. But the recording contains a lot more energy than the Marshev, and I'm not that picky when it comes to sonics.

[eschiss1]

apparently the parts were lost for some time, which makes me wonder how easy or hard it will be to borrow them for some conductor/programmer/orchestra who did want to include them in a live concert as mentioned above (not a total and complete tangent? I think? I hope?) - ah, hrm... let's see!...
the manuscript parts are at the French National Library;
performance material of some kind is on rental from Anton Benjamin Musikvorlage ;
the full score is or may be at the US Library of Congress and parts could be extracted therefrom, I suppose. So ... performance has barriers compared to that of works more readily available (whether through Fleisher or elsewhere) but at least the performance material exists, far as I can tell, which is better than not.

[FBerwald]

Now this concerto would be an ideal candidate for Hyperion RPC series.

[Christopher]

Now this concerto would be an ideal candidate for Hyperion RPC series.

...except that I'd rather PC's that hadn't been recorded at all were chosen, if that were allowed as criteria.

[Ilja]

In principle, yes.

But the trouble starts when a work is given a less than ideal treatment and is thereafter considered to have been "done already". A good example are the Bendix symphonies (Omsk/Shestakov), where the playing is bad enough to leave one frustrated but the music is of sufficient quality to make its promise evident.

While I would not consider either of the existing Pabst concerto recordings bad, I would greatly welcome a genuinely good one. And I do think that it's an important work.

[terry martyn]

I agree.   I think it´s time for this underrated work to be given the recording it deserves. It easily makes my top 20 favourites out of the over 300 I have.  And it would go down well in the concert hall.