GREAT RECORDINGS phase 15

RACHMANINOV: PIANO CONCERTO No.3
SAINT-SAËNS: PIANO CONCERTO No.2
SHOSTAKOVICH: PRELUDES & FUGUES Op.87 Nos. 5 & 24
Emil Gilels
Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire/André Cluytens

3 45819 2
(Angel: 3 45820 2)
Recorded 1954 & 1955
Mono/ADD
76 minutes

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‘Gilels was a true king of pianists and these recordings only confirm his legendary status. Here is his superlative musicianship, magisterial technique and, above all, unforgettable sonority. His Rachmaninov is among the few truly great performances of this work on disc.’
(The Gramophone)

Emil Gilels (1916–1985), one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, was born in Odessa in 1916, where he began to learn the piano and, at the age of 12, gave his first recital. In 1932, Artur Rubinstein, on a tour in Russia, heard Gilels and declared that if the young Russian ever came to America he, Rubinstein, would have to pack his bags. Nearly a quarter of a century later Gilels did indeed travel to the West and took the US and Europe by storm.

In 1935, Gilels moved from Odessa to Moscow, where he studied with the distinguished Ukrainian-born teacher Heinrich Neuhaus, who later described his pupil’s piano sound as ‘rich in noble metal, 20-carat gold, such as we find in the voices of great singers’. Gilels’s triumph at the Brussels International Piano Competition in 1938 launched an international career that had to put on hold for the duration of the Second World War.

Gilels’s activities outside Russia resumed in 1947 and gradually he was heard more widely in the West. His debuts with the EMI group of companies were made in the mid-1950s: the superb mono recordings of concertos by Rachmaninov and Saint-Saëns in Paris in 1954, and the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues in New York in 1955, the year of his American debut. In London in 1957 he recorded the Beethoven Concertos Nos.4 and 5, which are already available in the Great Recordings of the Century series.

Gilels was always a Titan of the keyboard, but his ‘elemental virtuosity’ was combined with the great lyrical gift noted by Heinrich Neuhaus. Though he is heard here in mostly Romantic music (Rachmaninov and Saint-Saëns), he later developed a deep understanding and mastery of the Classical repertory, hinted at on this CD in his performances of two of the Bachian Preludes and Fugues by the pianist’s compatriot Dmitri Shostakovich.