Mackerras, Wallfisch, LSO - Dvorak: Cello Concerto; Dohnanyi: Konzertstuck (2012)

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Mackerras, Wallfisch, LSO - Dvorak: Cello Concerto; Dohnanyi: Konzertstuck (2012)

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This month, on the Chandos Classics label, we are re-releasing our recording of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor and the Konzertstück for Cello and Orchestra by Dohnányi (CHAN8662), performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Charles Mackerras, with Raphael Wallfisch the featured soloist.

The Cello Concerto in B minor by Dvořák has become one of his most popular works, and perhaps the most popular concerto ever written for the instrument. He was asked to write this piece by a friend of Wagner, the cellist Hanuš Wihan. Initially reluctant, Dvořák stated that the cello was indeed a fine orchestral instrument but totally insufficient for a solo concerto. Fortunately, he changed his mind upon hearing Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto performed in concert, in 1894. The resulting Cello Concerto is richly inventive, full of deep feeling, and perfectly fitted to the cello. Dvořák combined his experience as an orchestral player with an understanding of the cello’s distinct textural qualities to produce a grand and emotionally intense work, one of his finest achievements.

Ernst von Dohnányi was highly acclaimed as a pianist-composer, and widely regarded during his lifetime as a successor to Liszt. As a composer, however, he had more in common with Brahms than with Liszt, despite his Hungarian heritage, and his creative output was not limited to the piano. His Konzertstück in D major is in fact a full-scale cello concerto, in three interconnected parts. A lyrical rhapsody, it begins quietly, the cello emerging out of the orchestra and seeming to sing, until parting with a sense of regret at the end.

Composer: Antonín Dvorák, Ernö von Dohnányi
Performer: Raphael Wallfisch
Conductor: Sir Charles Mackerras
Orchestra/Ensemble: London Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: Surprisingly, this CD, which was recorded in 1988 and released by Chandos in 1989, was never reviewed in Fanfare . It has been in the catalog ever since, and should you wish to purchase it as a full-priced disc for $15.99, it’s still available in its original incarnation as Chandos 8662. This remastered retread in Chandos’s “Classic” series will cost you $9.99.


Coupling Dvo?ák’s perennial cello concerto with Dohnányi’s not nearly as ubiquitous Konzertstück was, at the time, a shrewd marketing strategy, for competition in the Dvo?ák arena is so intense that unless Raphael Wallfisch offered some novelty, like playing the piece on one string holding his cello with its backside facing forward—as it’s claimed Franz Clement played a violin piece of his own composition on one string holding his instrument upside down between movements of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto—he would struggle to stand out among the crush of contenders. Dohnányi’s Konzertstück , on the other hand, although it has had its advocates on disc—most famously perhaps János Starker in the late 1950s—when Wallfisch made this recording for Chandos, there were few alternative versions. Since then, of course, we’ve had an excellent recent recording of the piece by Alan Gerhardt in Hyperion’s Romantic Cello Concerto series.


I’ve had my say on the Dvo?ák concerto in previous reviews and I haven’t changed my mind about it; I still don’t think it’s the greatest cello concerto ever written—I reserve that title for the Elgar concerto—though I understand why it’s so popular. Its Czech-inflected tunes and rhythms are memorable, and it’s filled with enough virtuosic flair to challenge the player and satisfy the audience. I just don’t think it cuts very deep emotionally, but that’s a personal reaction.


Dvo?ák was meat and potatoes for the late Charles Mackerras, and he leads the London Symphony Orchestra through the score masterfully. Wallfisch is a highly accomplished cellist—technically polished and musically intelligent—but he’s always struck me as being just one rung below the cello’s top-billed power players. There’s absolutely nothing about his playing I can point to as a flaw or fault in this performance, but neither can I say that it bests a couple of my favorites: Starker with Doráti also leading the LSO on a Mercury Living Presence recording, now available, by the way, in SACD format, and Mischa Maisky in his second recording of the work for Deutsche Grammophon, which he made in 2002 with Zubin Mehta and the Berlin Philharmonic. It, too, can be had in SACD format.


Though it’s tracked on this and other CDs as if it were a three-movement fast-slow-fast concerto, Dohnányi actually titled his Konzertstück properly because it’s not a concerto but an extended one-movement work in three sections in which the opening allegro returns in further developed, extended form and with an embedded cadenza for the solo cello. The whole piece, written in 1903, exhibits more of the rhapsodic, continuous unfolding feeling of a work not yet written at the time, like Bloch’s Schelomo . Dohnányi’s Konzertstück is a sweeping late-Romantic orchestral tone poem of a scope not unlike another work which had been written at the time, Strauss’s Don Quixote.


Chandos claims that at the time this recording was made, it was the premiere performance on disc of the Dohnányi work complete . To what extent the earlier of Starker’s two recordings, the one with Walter Susskind and the Philharmonia, is not complete I don’t know, and Gerald Larner’s booklet note doesn’t elaborate. Starker’s performance with Susskind takes 22:28. This recording by Wallfisch and Mackerras takes 24:12, and the Gerhardt version, which I have, takes exactly one second less, 24:11. With such close timings between two versions, it looks like there may be some missing bars in the first Starker account with Susskind (which I haven’t heard), especially since Starker’s second account with Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra (which I have heard) takes 24:02, suggesting that the second time around the missing measures were restored. But to muddy the waters, the headnote to a very recent recording by Gavriel Lipkind, reviewed by Peter J. Rabinowitz in Fanfare 35:3, gives the timing, with nothing else on the disc, as 31: 36. I haven’t heard that performance either, but unless Lipkind has discovered even more missing measures and restored them, his reading, at more than seven minutes longer than what seems to be a consensus timing of just over 24 minutes, must be truly protracted and staggeringly slow.


If you didn’t acquire this Chandos disc when it first came out, it’s a good buy at its rereleased budget price. You probably already have half a dozen Dvo?ák cello concertos on your shelf, but this is a fine, if not exceptional, one, and the Dohnányi is a worthwhile addition to any collection.