MISCHA DICHTER: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings = Piano works by TCHAIKOVSKY; BRAHMS; STRAVINSKY; BEETHOVEN; SCHUBERT – RCA 1965887832(7/31/24) (3 CDs: 33:50; 36:15; 43:52, Complete Contents listed below) [Distr. by Sony] ****:
When I consider the career of pianist Mischa Dichter (b. 1945), I tend to think nostalgically, affectionately, of the volatile promise he brought to the keyboard, my first having heard him at SUNY Binghamton, c. 1970, in a recital that included Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque and Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, the performances of which motivated my critical likening him to the late William Kapell. Dichter, a pupil of luminaries Aube Tzerko, Leonard Stein, and Rosina Lhevinne, captured the Silver Medal at the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, leading to his recording contract with RCA Victor. I had listened to two of his RCA records, that of Brahms/Stravinsky and Beethoven/Schubert, and I expressed my feeling that RCA had not caught his piercing sonority adequately. “I agree,” Dichter replied in our brief interview, “and I have already transferred my recording contract to Philips.”
Serving some years later as a music critic in Atlanta, Georgia, I attended a duo-recital by Mischa and Cipa Dichter, divided into two parts, the first by the duo in music of Mozart and Milhaud, and the second half all-Liszt played by Mischa solo, that included a blazing Vallée d’Obermann that, for me, solidified Dichter’s repute in Romantic repertory. That Friday night recital was followed by my attendance at a concert by the Atlanta Virtuosi, an ensemble with which I had direct participation as both critic and commentator. One of the administrators asked me if I had attended the Dichter concert two nights prior, and wondered, how I liked it. After I replied in the affirmative, he told me the critic for the Alanta Journal-Constitution, Diane Goldsmith, shot down the Dichter concert hard. I immediately retorted, “Well, being both deaf and stupid in a music critic is a bad combination!” My colleague then indicated that Ms. Goldsmith stood directly behind me in earshot, another one of my innumerable moments of serendipitous diplomacy!
More time had passed, and I attended a Mischa Dichter solo recital in San Jose, California, the one and only time I encouraged, vocally, Dichter to play a Chopin encore. And sadly, here I explain my reference to “nostalgia” in relation to my Dichter experience; for in my opinion, the poetry had gone. Certainly, I had been well aware of Dichter’s progression, in concerts and on recordings – the acclaimed discs for Philips, RCA, MusicMasters, and Koch Classics – that had contributed to his international esteem. I experienced – as had Yehudi Menuhin – the same phenomenon in regard to pianist Fou Ts’ong. The fund of spontaneous inspiration and exalted expression had exhausted itself, leaving only the digital execution of selected tones.
Thus, these restored three RCA volumes, recorded 1966-1969, revive in improved sound the youthful ardor a musician of immense talent communicated at the time. The Tchaikovsky Concerto with Leinsdorf (14 December 1966) enjoys a resonant, articulate facility, lithe and vehemently lyrical, without rhetorical excess or cliches. It may not exude the same girth as Richter and Karajan or the volcanic frenzy Horowitz achieves both with Toscanini and Szell, but the linear drive and musical potency remain palpable of the repeated-phrase formula modeled by Schumann in his own Concerto. In their accompanying liner notes, annotator Jed Distler and producer Richard Mohr establish the historical and critical credentials of each of the discs, citing contemporary praise.
The Brahms/Stravinsky disc, recorded 12-15 December 1967, brings us, simultaneously robust and intimate salon music, well instantiated by the first two of the pieces from the late Brahms, Op. 118. The Brahms poetry, his melancholy tenderness expressive of his “old bachelor’s” sensibility, resounds throughout Dichter’s cross-rhythms and gentle polyphony. The fierce aggression of the Capriccio in C# Minor from Op. 76 offers a moment of demonism offset by agitated reflection. Juxtaposed against the sweltering angst of the Capriccio, Dichter proffers the autumnal meditation in E major from Op. 116, the set of Fantasien. The lush, passing harmonies often anticipate harmonies in Debussy. Finally, we have the compressed Rhapsody in E-flat Major, from the last set of solo piano pieces, c. 1892. A possible allusion to Beethoven permeates the rhythm, while the middle section reverts to the folk-song ethos of Op. 117, No. 1. Dichter does well to graduate his scales and crescendos as he approaches the coda in brilliant, bravura fashion. “
Dichter enjoys a swift athleticism with his “Russian Dance” from Petrushka, relishing its jarring metric displacements and quick parlando. As much as Dichter appreciated Artur Rubinstein in the Tchaikovsky Concerto he had too recorded with Leinsdorf, Dichter was no less aware that this piano reduction of the 1913 Stravinsky ballet was also meant for Artur Rubinstein. The exotic scales and modal harmonies of “Petruska’s Room” no less bear a sparkling patina that suggests a musical box meant for Debussy. The last scene, “The Shrovetide Fair,” offers Dichter a tour de force for keyboard sonority on an exotic, orchestral scale. The lovely Russian melody, straight out of Rimsky-Korsakov, rises like a florid pendant above the sea of competing (staccato) impulses, the primal energies of love, lust, and abandonment that haunt the ballet’s scenario.
The last disc, devoted to Beethoven and Schubert, derives from two sessions, 17 and 18 June 1969. Having studied with Aube Tzerko, a pupil of Artur Schnabel, Dichter establishes a pace and voicing of Beethoven’s Andante Favori in F – the original second movement for the Waldstein Sonata – to achieve a sobriety and clarity of intimate expression, grazioso, that warrant repeated consideration. Artur Schnabel’s revelatory recording of Schubert Sonata in A, Op. Posth, D. 959 has influenced Dichter’s reading. Dichter’s opening Allegro for the 1828 Sonata in A invokes a grand leisure, his triplets leading to a marvel in four-part harmony, and then entering into the composer’s frequent confrontations of major and minor, dramatically poignant. The large scale has unfolded seamlessly, a controlled, digitally nuanced, thoughtful sojourn amidst exalted ruminations.
Dichter’s maturing sense of color finds a happy medium in Schubert’s second movement Andantino, a magnificent, ternary structure in F# minor in martial descents of the interval of a second, whose middle section in C# minor invokes a storm from the chromatic colossus Bach. We feel close to the latter’s Chromatic Fantasia, but here insistent in a manic fury. With the crisis’ abatement, we return via a major mode to the initial impulse, mollified by soft ornamentation, but ending in clouds and intimations of mortality. Dichter’s Scherzo: Allegro vivace frolics and cavorts in degrees of C, jabbing and mischievous. The Trio’s more poignant sensibility in D major shows off some lucid hand crossing before the pyrotechnics return. The final Rondo: Allegretto possesses a sense of serenity, not particularly stressed by its diversion into C# minor. Dichter maintains a light hand throughout the brief but finely hued series of transitions, the interior pulse steady. The surges of emotional drama evolve organically, not as a choppy aggregate of affective opposites. Dichter offers of fine vision of a work he likely could have considered again later in his career, had fate and circumstance not dictated otherwise, leaving us with what we might term “still fairer hopes,” as apropos.
—Gary Lemco
MISCHA DICHTER: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings
BRAHMS: Intermezzo in A Minor, Op. 118/1; Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118/2; Capriccio in C# Minor, Op. 76/5; Intermezzo in E Major, Op. 116/4; Rhapsody in E-flat Major, Op. 119/4;
STRAVINSKY: 3 Movements from Petrushka;
BEETHOVEN: Andante in F Major “Andante favori,” WoO 57;
SCHUBERT: Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959
TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23
Boston Symphony Orchestra/ Erich Leinsdorf
