Elly Ney: The complete Brunswick & Electrola Solo 78-rpm recordings
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Genre:
Instrumental
Label: APR
Magazine Review Date: 07/2019
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 232
Mastering:
ADD
Catalogue Number: APR7311
Author: Jed Distler
One would assume that a pianist known for playing Brahms’s Second Concerto and late Beethoven would be something of a powerhouse. Yet Ney’s 1934 38 solo and concerto recordings for the Electrola label generally reveal a smaller-scale artist. Her 1937 Beethoven Second Concerto with Fritz Zaun conducting is earthbound and matter-of-fact next to the more imaginatively inflected 1933 HMV Artur Schnabel traversal. Yet Ney and her husband, the conductor Willem van Hoogstraten, display great chamber-like rapport in Mozart’s K450, notwithstanding stylistically antediluvian phrase-tapering and swoopy portamentos. In the pair’s world-premiere recording of Strauss’s Burleske, Ney’s fingers are hard-pressed to keep up with her husband’s rather optimistic tempos. Ney’s Mozart A minor Rondo is new to CD, I believe, in a flippant, trivial performance that completely misses the point of Mozart’s subtle harmonic sense and expressive depth.
Two Beethoven sonata performances (Opp 7 & 111) are strong on pointing up local details yet weak on dynamic contrast, cumulative force and conveying the sense of long line one hears in contemporaneous Beethoven recordings by interpreters as disparate as Schnabel, Backhaus, Kempff and Petri. Lyricism and intimacy, however, entirely befit her renditions of that composer’s Andante favori and the WoO70 Variations, as well as her Schumann Kinderszenen and the best of her Schubert (the F minor Impromptu, D935 No 4) and Brahms (Op 117 No 1) traversals.
Appearing for the first time together on CD, to the best of my knowledge, Ney’s 1922 acoustic Brunswick discs are a mixed bag, ranging from dull Chopin and Schubert to a lively Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No 8 and the remarkably terse and textually honest recorded premiere of Debussy’s ‘Feux d’artifice’. Although I don’t always agree with annotator Jonathan Summers’s artistic conclusions, his research is beyond reproach, and so are the remasterings.
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