Search - Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann, Franz [Vienna] Schubert :: Highlights from the Rubinstein Collection

Okay, so you're not about to take out a second mortgage and buy the complete RCA Rubinstein Collection (all 82 volumes of it), but you'd quite like to see what all the fuss is about. Well, this is a true sampler disc in that it demonstrates the sheer variety of the edition--on which necessary cutting down reduces more substantial works to single movements--and it gives you a feel for the extraordinary range of Rubinstein's art. Here we get works by composers ranging from Beethoven via Grieg, Granados, and Rachmaninov to Debussy. Chopin is the composer indelibly linked to Rubinstein's name, and naturally enough he's represented here too--there's no doubt that the opening Nocturne (Op. 15 No. 1) is a gem, but it's one of many: just listen to his elfin performance, together with Heifetz and Feuermann, of the "Rondo" from Schubert's B flat Trio; or the masterly way he dominates the orchestra without ever beating the piano into submission in the finale of Brahms's First Concerto; or his heady, heat-infused reading of the Fifth Spanish Dance of Granados. Only the Schubert (from 1941) sounds whiskery; everything else, from the 1950s and 60s, comes up like new, and it provides a fine introduction to one of the greats of the last century. --Harriet Smith