These two works are undoubtedly the greatest of the forgotten concertos we have not previously tackled and have been much requested. Both were written by hugely successful virtuoso pianists who were also composers, and both had a major place in the nineteenth-century repertoire, only falling from favour in the 1920s as modernism found its place in the concert hall.

The G major Anton Rubinstein violin concerto is a fine and powerful work, quite as good as many a lesser-known Russian example in the same genre, and easily as deserving of wider currency as, say, the Taneyev Suite de Concert, which is just as rarely heard these days. Nishizaki gives a committed and polished reading, though you often feel that this is music written by a pianist who had marginally less facility when writing for the violin. Still, here’s a well-schooled performance, full of agreeable touches of imagination (the Andante shows Nishizaki’s fine-spun tone to particularly good effect) delivered with crisply economical urgency that makes good musical sense even of the work’s plainer and less idiomatic passages.

In 1875, The Demon had the greatest success of any of Rubinstein operas, both in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Other compositions included the E flat Piano Concerto, Fantasia for Two Pianos, and the opera Nero". After a concert tour of England, he was made a Hereditary Nobleman by the Tsar, and in 1883 he was awarded the Cross of St. Vladimir for his contribution to musical education in Russia. He also gained a new student named Alexander Glazunov, whose talent at the piano greatly impressed him.

Anton Rubinstein was a towering figure of Russian musical life, and one of the 19th century’s most charismatic musical figures. Rivalled at the keyboard only by Liszt, he was near the last in a line of pianist-composers that climaxed with Liszt, Busoni, and Rachmaninov. Like them, Rubinstein’s reputation as a composer in his day was more controversial than his reputation as a performer. But unlike them, his vast compositional output, much of it containing music of beauty and originality, still remains relatively unexplored territory. Rubinstein was one of the most prolific composers of the 19th century, with a catalogue of works ranging from several hundred solo piano compositions, to concertos, symphonies, chamber music, operas, choral works, and songs.

This disc brings to a conclusion Joseph Banowetz's admirable survey of Rubinstein's complete music for piano and orchestra for Marco Polo. The Fifth Concerto (dating from 1874) is by far the most monumental, both in terms of duration it spans some 46 minutes—and in the virtuosic demands that it places on any pianist brave enough to undertake a performance. Like the Fourth, which was taken into the repertoire of Josef Hofmann the Fifth also found a legendary advocate in Josef Lhevinne, who included it in his sensational American debut concert with Safanov and the Russian Symphony Orchestra in New York in 1906.

Anton Rubinstein was a towering figure of Russian musical life, and one of the 19th century’s most charismatic musical figures. Rivalled at the keyboard only by Liszt, he was near the last in line of pianist-composers that reached a climax with Liszt, Busoni, and Rachmaninov. Like them Rubinstein’s reputation as a composer in his day was more controversial than his reputation as a performer, but unlike them, his vast compositional output, much of it containing music of beauty and originality, still remains relatively unexplored territory. Rubinstein wrote his eight works for piano and orchestra over the last 44 years of his life, with the five concertos dating from 1850–1874.

If, as Joseph Banowetz claims in his lively and informed notes, Rubinstein was ''the last in a line of pianist-composers that climaxed with Liszt, Busoni and Rachmaninov'', it is surely necessary to add that he was hardly a composer in the same league. And while I am more than grateful to have two such rarely heard concertos on record, powerfully and persuasively performed, it is difficult to warm to their often facile and derivative quality. Rubinstein may have been an anarchic and elemental virtuoso but he could be a sadly conventional composer. Clearly, he knew the finale of Beethoven's E flat Piano Sonata, Op. 31 No. 3, all too well, and in the First Concerto its propulsive tarantella combines uneasily with a Mendelssohnian mix of earnestness and sugar-sweet facility.

Few Russian musicians in the second half of the nineteenth century could match the eminence of Anton Rubinstein. As a piano virtuoso he was internationally admired, as a progressive educator he had profound influence, and as a composer he was both significant and successful. The Symphony No. 6 in A minor, Op. 111 was his last symphony, composed in 1866, and fully revealing those qualities of grace and energy, as well as clever scoring, that make his works so appealing.

Anton Rubinstein was one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century music, a great piano virtuoso, conductor and influential teacher. The fifth of his six Symphonies is thoroughly Russian in its melodies, and is often compared to his student Tchaikovsky's First Symphony. The overture to Rubinstein's first opera Dmitry Donsky is based on a similarly national Russian theme, while Faust, written in Leipzig in 1854, is the sole surviving movement of an abandoned Faust symphony.

The Fourth is probably the best of Rubinstein’s Symphonies. Written in 1874 it’s a deeply uneven and ultimately unconvincing work but contains enough perplexing turbulence to elevate it far beyond the merely decorative, beyond the post Mendelssohnian symphonic statement. If it never reaches the heights of a genuine Romantic crisis symphony it contains intriguing material sufficient to warrant more than a second hearing and this Naxos issue, first issued on Marco Polo 8.223319 in 1991, provides just such an opportunity.

The Symphony No. 3 in A major Op. 56 (1855) makes a useful introduction to Anton Rubinstein's complete set of six. It's less inflated and rhetorical than its siblings, having a directness to its thematic material that's immediately appealing. And because No. 3 is abstract in content, and therefore far less reliant on descriptive effect than Rubinstein's later programmatic symphonies, the orchestration is more conservative–just pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

…but an interesting contrast is the other large-scale effort in the list—Rubinstein’s 2nd symphony (‘Ocean’). It’s significantly longer than ‘A Sea Symphony,’ but manages to avoid any feeling of excess. It moves purposefully, it isn’t carrying the baggage of verse, and it’s divided into seven individual movements, none of which are too big to be easily comprehended. Tuneful, dramatic, accessible, a delight from the first note to the last, it’s filled with musical devices which would be commandeered by film composers decades hence and I think Rubinstein deserves credit for a form of originality that scarcely anyone in his own day could have even recognized.

We remember Anton RUBINSTEIN as an outstanding pianist who rivalled, and even outshone, Liszt. He gave his first public concert when aged 10 and toured Scandinavia, Austria, Germany, London and Paris as a child virtuoso…
Symphony No. 1 in F Major is a charming and well-crafted work, written at a time when Rubinstein was in St Petersburg, being supported by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, sister-in-law of the Tsar. The work has strong influences of Mendelssohn (who died three years previously) with a clear framework, memorable themes and dynamic rhythms. This symphony combines technical skill with romantic charm.