Mindru Katz: Live! = LISZT: Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major; TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23 – Mindru Katz, piano/Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra/Harold Byrns/Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Sergiu Comissiona (Tchaikovsky)
Cembal d’amour CD 154, 54:53 [Distr. by Qualiton] ****:
If you were to liken the spectacular keyboard virtuosity of Israeli legend Mindru Katz (1925-1978) in the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto recorded in Gothenburg, Sweden with Sergiu Comissiona (10 January 1969) to the various renditions from Vladimir Horowitz, pianist-producer Mordecai Shehori–a direct pupil of Katz and recipient of tutelage from Horowitz–would literally dismiss the Horowitz version as inferior. Indeed, it is rare to find a reading of the ubiquitous Tchaikovsky Concerto that maintains a broad–even leisurely–architectural canvas while releasing so many individual colors and such titanic aggression in the course of its repetitions of phrase and line, in the manner of the Schumann Concerto – its obvious model. The nearest competitor emotionally might be the famed Richter inscription with Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Symphony, although the orchestral ensemble there occasionally frays at the high ends. Comissiona (1928-2005), himself a Constantin Silvestri acolyte with a fine ear for nuance, provides a firmly flexible accompaniment for Katz, who simply devours huge leaps, runs, and double octaves as if they were mother’s milk. We usually think of Katz as an “intellectual” pianist, the very opposite of the bravura virtuoso, but that he can accommodate the unbridled energies of the Tchaikovsky testify to an explosively tempestuous spirit behind a pedagogue’s persona.
The 1961 performance of the Liszt A Major Concerto with conductor Harold Byrns (1903-1997) proves equally compelling, but for different reasons. Like the famed collaboration between Robert Casadesus and George Szell for CBS (ML 4588), a distinct sense of aerial poetry suffuses the reading, Katz deliberately introspective in many of the slower sections of this labyrinthine piece, modeled on the F Minor Konzertstuecke of Carl Maria von Weber. When the piece does convulse with passionate declamations and martial riffs, Katz alternately sings and plummets through the filigree with the tiger’s ferocity. Conductor Byrns (nee Bernstein) makes his own sparks, the sonic mix pungent, darkly chromatic and inflamed in the Liszt style, which favors ecstasies as Dantesque as they are Elysian.
— Gary Lemco
