Slovak Rsostankovsky - Rubinstein: Symphony No. 3 / Eroica Fantasia [CD]

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Anton Rubinstein (1829 - 1894)Symphony No. 3 in A major, Op. 56 • Eroica Fantasia, Op. 110It was Gustav Mahler who described himself as three times homeless: a Bohemian in Austria; an Austrian among Germans; a Jew throughout the whole world. The nineteenth century provided chances for Jewish assimilation into a Gentile world. The Jewish poet Heine described baptism as a ticket of admission into European culture, and it was a course chosen by some, such as the Mendelssohn family and in Russia by the Rubinsteins. Nevertheless, as Jewish fortunes prospered, anti-Semitism became more overt. There is no doubt that Anton Rubinstein’s reputation suffered because of his racial origins, much as it suffered among Russian nationalists as a result of his obviously cosmopolitan or German musical proclivities. Anton Rubinstein was born at Vikhvatinets in the Podolsk district of the Russian Empire, on the borders of Moldavia, in 1829. A few years later his family moved to Moscow, and after early instruction on the piano from his mother he took lessons from a teacher there, Villoing, later to be the teacher of his brother Nikolay. He gave his first public concert in Moscow at the age of ten. There followed four years of touring as a child virtuoso, years that took him to Paris, to Scandinavia, Austria and Germany, and to London, where he played for Queen Victoria. In 1844 the family settled in Berlin, where Rubinstein took lessons in harmony and counterpoint from Glinka’s former teacher, the Prussian royal music librarian Siegfried Dehn. In 1846 Rubinstein’s father died and the rest of the family returned to Russia, while he remained abroad in Vienna and in Pressburg (the modern Bratislava), earning a living as he could by teaching and cynical about the support that the apparently generous Liszt seemed to offer, which took the form of a visit to his garret in Vienna, with his entourage of disciples. As a pianist Rubinstein rivalled Liszt in fame, and the latter spoke of him with grudging respect as a composer and player, a clever fellow, but unduly influenced by the classicism of Mendelssohn, adding a less charitable description of him as the pseudo-Musician of the future on the occasion of a visit to Weimar in 1854 for the first performance of his opera Sibirskiye okhotniki (The Siberian Huntsmen). Rubinstein’s fortunes had changed as a result of a meeting with members of the Russian Imperial family during the course of an earlier visit to Paris. On his return to Russia in the winter of 1848 he found support from the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, a German princess and sister-in-law of the Tsar. With her active encouragement he established in 1859 the Russian Musical Society and three years later the St Petersburg Conservatory, of which he remained director until 1867, before resuming his career as a travelling virtuoso. He returned to his position in St Petersburg in 1887, after years during which he had won general acclaim as

Symphony No. 3 in A major, Op. 56

Eroica Fantasia, Op. 110