Artur Rubinstein (1964 LP RCA Victor Red Seal LSC-2733 SEALED) Beethoven Emperor

$

34

This album is still sealed in its original shrinkwrap, never opened, never played! This is the 1964 RCA Victor Red Seal Records release of the LP Artur Rubinstein, Boston Symphony Orchestra with Erich Leinsdorf – Beethoven Emperor Concerto (LSC-2733) and not a pirated, bootlegged, or copied version. Enjoy!

Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 in E-flat is one of the supreme challenges in the pianist’s repertory, for it has tried the souls – and the fingers – of generations of virtuosi since its first performance in Leipzig on November 28, 1811.  The work is heroic in splendor and noble in proportion.  The sobriquet “Emperor” (not bestowed by Beethoven) is only coincidental with its quality of imperial grandeur, for in 1809, when Beethoven wrote the concerto, he was hardly in any mood to honor Napoleon.  The Emperor’s armies occupied Vienna after a bombardment which had sent Beethoven to the cellar, with cushions over his head to protect the remnant of his failing hearing.  “A disturbing wild life around me,” he recalled later, “with nothing but drums, cannon, men and misery of all sorts.”

During the occupation, Beethoven all but stopped composing and turned to the examination of music by other composers and to the complete works of Schiller and Goethe.  Napoleon’s armies had entered Vienna in May; by October, the Treaty of Vienna was signed, and in November, the troops left the city.  Beethoven began to work again, and finished the Fifth Piano Concerto, the Tenth Quartet (Op. 74) and the first two movements of the Piano Sonata Op. 81a.  Perhaps significantly, the works are all in E-flat major, the key of the “Eroica” Symphony.

Beethoven never performed his Fifth Concerto in public; he had given up his career as a performing artist by then, and his last keyboard concerto was created with some unknown virtuoso in mind.  Unlike the first four concerti, the fifth allows no option in the cadenza.  It is incorporated into the architecture of the whole.  “Do no make a cadenze,” the composer wrote on the score, “but go at once to the following.”

The pianist at the concerto’s premiere at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig was Friedrich Schneider.  According to an account in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the work was “one of the most original, the most imaginative, the most brilliant and, at the same time, the most difficult concertos in existence.  Musikdirektor Schneider played in such a masterly way that it is impossible to imagine a performance more accomplished.”

Beethoven “Emperor” Concerto remains a constant joy to the listener and an eternal challenge to the pianist. 

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