Anton Rubinstein: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Three Serenades. Han Chen, piano. Naxos. $19.99.
Anton Rubinstein: Piano Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4. Han Chen, piano. Naxos. $19.99.
Founder of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, founder of the Moscow Conservatory, Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) encapsulated the entire history of piano music through seven gigantic consecutive concerts that he played in Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States. Even his more-standard concert programs could run three hours. Rubinstein was Tchaikovsky’s composition teacher; his only private piano student was Josef Hofmann; and he was a prolific composer in all forms – although always admired more for his piano playing than for the specific works he played, which inevitably included his own. Rubinstein strongly influenced Rachmaninoff, who called Rubinstein “the most original and unequalled pianist in the world.”
Yet for all his outreach and considerable influence, it would seem, on the basis of two first-rate Naxos CDs featuring Han Chen’s performances of all four Rubinstein piano sonatas, that Rubinstein – unlike Liszt, who thought Rubinstein resembled Beethoven both in appearance and in pianistic technique – wrote piano music that only Rubinstein himself could present fully effectively. This was not a matter of its enormous virtuoso requirements – indeed, Rubinstein was famous (or notorious) for hitting numerous wrong notes during his recitals, and not caring about doing so provided that he successfully communicated the emotional effects of the music. Instead, it had to do with music that, however well-played, speaks more of its influences (notably Mendelssohn and Schumann) than of anything especially insightful brought to it compositionally by Rubinstein himself. This does not mean Rubinstein’s piano sonatas are directly imitative of earlier models but that they absorb those models effectively without actually extending them, as if Rubinstein-as-composer expects Rubinstein-as-performer to clarify the breadth and depth inherent in the notes.
That is a near-impossible feat for any post-Rubinstein pianist to accomplish, and it is to Chen’s credit that he undertakes it with such prodigious technique and enthusiasm, even if the results are not always entirely convincing. It is worth noting that Chen (born 1988) brings to the sonatas a kind of youthful vigor that fits their years of creation well: Rubinstein started writing Nos. 1 and 2 when he was just 19, and Chen’s performances of those sonatas date to 2018. Furthermore, Rubinstein completed No. 3 and the Three Serenades in 1855, in his mid-20s. It is only the final and longest sonata, which dates to 1877, that can be thought of as being in the composer’s fully mature style.
Sonata No. 1 is a work that reaches for vastness and is attractively played by Chen with close attention to its scale. It is not a particularly well-unified work, sounding somewhat Beethovenian here and a bit Schubertian there, but it benefits from the clean sound and careful focus on detail that Chen brings to it. Interestingly, Rubinstein himself once said that “the pedal is the soul of the piano” – perhaps a clue to the reason his performances sounded so accomplished notwithstanding the wrongly struck notes – but Chen’s use of the pedals is well-considered and not overdone. This lets the music say clearly what it has to say – although that turns out not to be very much that is original. Sonata No. 2 is the only one of the four in three rather than four movements, its centerpiece being a very extended theme-and-variations movement that is unfortunately somewhat too extended in Chen’s reading: the pacing draws altogether too much attention to the rather mundane nature of the material. The sonata as a whole sounds more complex than No. 1, and its first movement is genuinely noteworthy (pun intended) – it initially sounds like an extended étude or set of études before eventually becoming a vehicle for effective virtuosic display. The sonatas are separated on the CD by the Three Serenades, which are pleasant and tuneful and of no great consequence – they function essentially as aural palate cleansers between the more grandly conceived sonatas.
Chen’s recording of Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4 dates to 2024, and the six years between the performances on these two discs show that Chen has, if anything, become even more fluent in presenting and interpreting Rubinstein. No. 3 – the only one of these works in a major key – was Rubinstein’s personal favorite among the four sonatas, but despite the skill with which Chen performs it, it feels more like a work-in-progress than one fully formed and fully communicative. This sonata may point unusually clearly to the apparent disparity between what Rubinstein wrote down and what he performed: it is certainly possible that under his own hands, the work would be more cohesive and seem more thoroughly worked-out than it does here. This is not to take anything away from Chen’s technical prowess, and indeed the finale as Chen plays it comes across well and as a conclusive capstone to a work that until this fourth movement has seemed somewhat uncertain about where it has been going. As for Rubinstein's Sonata No. 4, its 44-minute duration in Chen’s reading puts it at the length of Beethoven’s No. 29, Hammerklavier, and it actually covers some of the same emotional territory, albeit much less cogently. The highly dramatic first movement goes through abrupt mood changes; the second, a scherzo in all but name, is light and surprisingly humorous; the third goes through many emotive motions without ever settling into any specific one or becoming convincingly lyrical; and the fourth offers the strongest possible contrast between light, even elegant passages and tub-thumping ones requiring the most-powerful keyboard technique possible – which Chen duly and suitably supplies. A work of grand scope that is nevertheless somewhat lacking in grandeur, Sonata No. 4 shows Rubinstein as a clear master of piano technique and a composer highly fluent in creating works that explore and exploit the keyboard. But it also shows him to have been lacking in the kind of emotional connectivity that translates well to pianists other than himself and that leads audiences to move beyond admiration to genuine emotional engagement. It can be rather exhausting to hear Rubinstein’s piano sonatas – not to mention to play them! – but their aftereffects lie more in the realm of being impressed with their technical demands than in that of appreciating and responding to any sort of inward journey on which the composer guides his listeners.
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