Abbey Simon’s recording of Chopin’s complete works for piano and orchestra has been respected since its first release in 1973 (then as part of the first quadraphonic Vox Box 3LP release, SXVBX 5126). What we have here are newly remastered offerings from the original tapes (tape transfers byMike Clements, and with Andrew Walton as remastering engineer; Marc Aubert and Joanna Nickrenz were the original producers back ar the 1972 sessions, with “Elite Recordings” listed as “engineer”). This is Volume 2: Volume 1 of Chopin’s complete works for piano and orchestra with soloist Abbey Simon can be heard on VOX-NX-3032CD.
These are rightly seen as classic recordings. Abbey Simon plays with superb lightness and is textbook in his pedal work, itself light, allowing for full detail to come through. The Vox recoding is anouced as “Audiophile,” and indeed for 1973 is starting-of-the-art.
Little known today, conduct Heribert Beissel extracts sterling playing from the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra (he was clearly sill alive in 2002, when a live performance of a Haydn keyboard concerto was released by Channel Classics, and in 2015, there was a recording of Mozart’s concertos); his has been allied to Hamburg, and my most notable recording by him is the of the Pfitzner Piano Concerto on Marco Polo (he seems to specialise in collaborative conducting, though there is.a Reinecke Third Symphony on Signum). Chopin’s orchestral writing is notoriously workaday, and yet there is an argument to say that Chopin really created his own “sound,” and Beissel seems to run with the latter.
The recitative-lke section in the slow movement is one of the finest renditions of this section in the catalogue (Zimermam and Giulini being the the other at this point);
The finale sparkles, the horn calls arresting; the concertos were virtuoso vehicle’s for the young Chopin, and in both of the outer movements (and partucularly the last) we can hear this in Simon’s account:
Good to have he Mozart variations here; Arrau and Ian Hobson both offer fine ratings in very different ways of this piece, but I like Abbey Simon’s sense of fantasy in the work’s earlier stages, and his exuberance in the later, with that sparkling fingerwork once again in evidence:
The concert rondo “à la Krakowiak,” heard in this context, reveals real kinship with the writing in the concerto on the disc, while the rhythms of the krakowiak seem to hearken back to the concerto’s finale. More, both Simon and Beissel are superb when Chopin darkens the music:
A terrific reissue, available from Amazon here.
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