Michael Rabin is surely one of the greatest violinists in history – a prodigiously gifted virtuoso who meteorically blazed across the musical firmament before his untimely death in 1072 at age 35. His official discography is small, but recent years have seen the addition of numerous rediscovered live performances to his growing discography, most notable four CDs previously issued by Parnassus that contain his complete radio performances on The Bell telephone Hour. The current release contains a major addition to the Rabin discography – the Beethoven Violin Concerto, recorded around 1960 with the National Orchestral Association conducted by John Barnett, along with the first general release of an outstanding concert performance of Paul Creston’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Henry Sorkin. For violin music lovers, this release will be a “must-hear” event!
Last September I included in this column Parnassus’s ‘Michael Rabin on The Bell Telephone Hour’, promising a forthcoming second volume, which has now appeared and like the first includes some dazzling tracks. Both volumes are mandatory purchases for violin buffs. But more important still for fans of this great but ill-fated Ivan Galamian pupil (Rabin died from a fall in 1972 aged 35) is a coupling of two full-length concertos that he never had the chance to take into the studio, Paul Creston’s Second (which Rabin commissioned) and, most treasurable, the Beethoven Concerto. … Creston’s work is athletic and lyrical, the lovely (even luscious) central Andante accommodating, towards its close, a sizeable cadenza, all of it brilliantly played. … Rabin’s account of Beethoven’s principal masterpiece for the violin (recorded c1960) is above all tonally pure, gliding towards the stratosphere without a hitch, with perfectly executed trills, whereas Kreisler’s first-movement cadenza is played with a rare level of intonational accuracy. Both recordings only go to illustrate Rabin’s level of musical and technical superiority while at the height of his powers. Gene Gaudette’s remastering is excellent and so are Leslie Gerber’s notes.
-Rob Cowan, Gramophone Jan 2025
