FREE UK SHIPPING OVER £30!

Michael Rabin - The Studio Recordings 1954-60 | Testament SBT61471

Michael Rabin - The Studio Recordings 1954-60

£44.54 £35.64

save £8.91 (20%)

special offer ending 24/04/2024

Usually available for despatch within 2-3 working days

Label: Testament

Cat No: SBT61471

Barcode: 0749677147129

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 6

Release Date: 12th September 2011

Contents

About

CD1 71.30
Nicolò Paganini
Violin Concerto No.1 in D, Op.6
Alexander Glazunov
Violin Concerto in A minor, Op.82
Camille Saint-Saëns
Havanaise, Op.83
Introduction & Rondo capriccioso, Op.28

CD2 71.38
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto in D, Op.35
Felix Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64
Maurice Ravel
Tzigane (Rapsodie de concert)

CD3 71.42
Henryk Wieniawski
Violin Concerto No.1 in F sharp minor, Op.14
Max Bruch
Scottish Fantasy, Op.46
Johann Sebastian Bach
Sonata No.3 in C, BWV1005

CD4 71.56
Nicolò Paganini
Violin Concerto No.1 in D, Op.6
Henryk Wieniawski
Violin Concerto No.2 in D minor, Op.22
Eugène Ysaÿe
Sonata in C minor, Op.27 No.4
Sonata in D minor, Op.27 No.3

CD5 72.01
Nicolò Paganini
Caprices Nos.1-24, Op.1

CD6 79.28
Mosaics
Wieniawski · Debussy · Ravel · Chopin · Mompou · Scriabin · Sarasate · Elgar · Engel · Prokofiev · Suk
The Magic Bow
Massenet · Kreisler · Dinicu · Sarasate · Paganini · Brandl · Rimsky-Korsakov · Saint-Saëns

For the last eleven years of his life Michael Rabin was without an active recording contract. We know from an interview that he gave six months before his accidental death that this hurt him. Rabin longed to record the Beethoven and Brahms Concertos and saw more opportunities to explore the nineteenth-century violinist-composer repertoire, but this was not to be. Would the ending have been different had Rabin stayed with EMI as Walter Legge wanted? Did his decision to opt for Capitol over EMI, for reasons that were perhaps no more complex than wanting to travel less, hurt his long-term recording prospects by severing a direct connection with someone who had the ability to hear what hard-nosed marketing men could not?

Towards the end of 1964 Rabin accepted a reduced royalty from EMI on the re-issue of his recordings, but within a few years even these meagre offerings were gone. “All but two or three of my records have been deleted” he ruefully informed the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I tried to get [Capitol] to re-issue them or send me the rights to them, but nothing has happened. I guess I can’t blame the recording companies for not helping me. The Classical business is in trouble, I hear...” This admission of defeat was not, however, the end of attempts at resurrecting his recorded legacy. After her son’s death Jeanne Rabin took up the cause, writing to EMI and Capitol and expressing a wish to reissue the recordings at her own expense. There was mention of Capitol charging her one dollar a pressing with the money generated by sales going to establish a Memorial Trust Fund in her son’s name. This too never came to pass. But the truism that great art tends to outlive the artist is borne out by Rabin’s posthumous fate. Fifty years after he last set foot in a recording studio as a Capitol artist, we have this new edition of his EMI recordings, and in 2012 Testament will release a further 3-CD set of Rabin performances taken from private tapes belonging to Bertine Rabin (Testament SBT3 1470). The frisson remains. Neither the passage of time nor Rabin’s thwarted hopes have diminished his allure.

Extract from the booklet note by Anthony Feinstein

Error on this page? Let us know here

Need more information on this product? Click here