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Schumann: The Four Symphonies and The Piano Concerto (Leon Fleisher, pianist; the Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell conducting; Epic, 4 LPs). Szell's readings are blazing or majestic as the occasion demands, and they may even temporarily lay to rest the old debate about whether Schumann knew how to write for any instrument other than the piano...
Walton recalls his First Symphony, finished in 1935, as "the angry-young-man sort of thing." The new work is "slightly more civilized-maybe too civilized." As played under George Szell's direction last week, it emerged as a massive, melodious composition, almost Straussian in its traditional conservatism. In its three movements it alternates between moods of surgingly sensuous lyricism and a kind of heraldic pomp reminiscent of Walton's own Orb and Sceptre march, written in 1953 for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. The symphony's greatest strength lies in the raw dramatic power that never...
Schumann: Piano Concerto in A Minor (Leon Fleisher, pianist; the Cleveland Orchestra, under George Szell; Epic). When he won Belgium's famed International Concours in 1952, recalls San Francisco-born Leon Fleisher, he was known as a garden-variety YAP (Young American Pianist). In time he became a DYAP (Distinguished Young American Pianist); now, at 32, he is a fully developed DAP (Distinguished American Pianist), as this superb reading of a popular war horse (22 available LP versions) demonstrates. Fleisher finds a Schumann that is virile, sinewy, full of sharply-profiled contrasts of tone and tempo...
...judges: Abram Chasins, Gitta Gradova, George Szell, Rudolf Serkin, Rudolf Firkusny, Leopold Marines, Xadia Reisenberg, Alfred Wallenstein, Leon Fleisher and two previous Leventritt winners, Eugene Istomin and Gary Graffman...
...Rochberg's Symphony No. 2, as performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, was a thickly textured, darkly intense work that moved in a riptide of conflicting rhythms and clashing dissonances. It opened with an impassioned theme in the strings and horns, unfolded into a busy, brusque scherzo touched with jazz. The finale built to a rushing climax, then subsided in a resigned, dramatically simple theme played by strings and woodwinds. The audience could summon up only polite applause. But Cleveland's Composer-Critic Herbert Elwell found Rochberg's mastery of the tone row remarkable...