Rubinstein: Violin Concerto / Cui: Suite Concertante

Description

Anton Rubinstein (1829 - 1894)Violin Concerto in G major, Op. 46Anton Rubinstein achieved the height of fame as a pianist, a rival and successor to Liszt. His abilities as a composer, however, attracted less favourable notice in some quarters. In particular he was referred to by Liszt in relatively ungenerous terms and he met an even cooler reception from an increasingly important group of contemporaries in his native Russia, where his castigation of the Russian nationalist composers grouped around Balakirev as amateurs aroused the animosity of the most influential writer of the movement, Vladimir Stasov. By education and inclination Rubinstein was a conservative composer of the more traditional German school. It was, therefore, understandable that his attitude to nationalist compositions should initially have been cold, and that the music of Liszt and, still more, of Wagner should have proved unacceptable to him.Anton Rubinstein was born in a district of Russia near the frontier of modern Romania, the son of German-Jewish parents, who, like Mendelssohn's father and mother, had chosen to become Christians, a choice that both Mendelssohn and Rubinstein stressed in a number of sacred works. After early piano lessons with his mother, Rubinstein became a pupil of Alexander Villoing in Moscow, where the family had settled, and by the age of nine was ready to make his first public appearance, followed, during the next three years, by a series of concert tours taking him to Paris, the Netherlands, England, Scandinavia and Germany. In 1844 the Rubinstein moved to Berlin, where they remained until the death of Anton Rubinstein's father in 1846. The period in Prussia allowed study with Siegfried Dehn, Glinka's former teacher, and acquaintance with Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. For two years after his father's death Anton Rubinstein lived in Vienna, alleviating his poverty by giving piano lessons, and much in need of the kind of practical assistance that Liszt might have given him, had he been so inclined. Unusually, the latter had refused to accept Rubinstein as a pupil when he heard him play in 1846, perhaps sensing in him a possible rival. It was through the help of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlova, a German-born princess married to the brother of the Tsar, that Rubinstein achieved his first outstanding success as an adult, at first as her prot ge, in St Petersburg. By 1854 he had resumed his career as a virtuoso, and at the end of the decade he established, under her patronage, the Russian Musical Society, followed, in 1862, by the St Petersburg Conservatory, of which he was the first director. He relinquished office in 1867, and resumed it briefly between 1887 and 1890. He died in 1894. Anton Rubinstein devoted much of his energy to concert performance as one of the greatest pianists of his day, but also found time for conducting and for composition. As a pianist his repertoire was enormous, his style and appearance giving rise to the improbable rumour tha