Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Piano Concerto no. 1 in G Minor, op. 25*
Variations sérieuses, op. 54
Rondo capriccioso, op. 14
Caprice in B-flat Minor, op. 33 no. 3
Helmut Roloff (pianist)*
Dorothea Winand-Mendelssohn (pianist)
Orchestre Symphonique de Radio Berlin/Karl Rucht*
rec. 1954 (concerto) & 1951 (solo pieces)
Reviewed from digital download
Forgotten Records 2422 [45]

This is an intriguing release featuring two little-known German pianists who survived difficult circumstances during WWII.  

I was unfamiliar with the pianist Helmut Roloff (1912-2001), and looking for more biographical information, I turned to his very detailed Wikipedia page, presumably maintained by his son and biographer, Stefan Roloff. He originally planned to pursue a career in law but turned to music when the Nazi racial laws took effect; although not himself Jewish, Roloff was raised in a family of freethinkers that despised racism. After completing his studies at the Berlin Hochschule, Roloff taught at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. During the war, he participated in the German resistance movement and was arrested by the Gestapo and questioned. A fellow resistance member convinced the interrogators that Roloff was not involved with the group, and he was released. After the war, he taught at the Berlin Hochschule and became known as a proponent of new music, occasionally giving seminars at the Darmstadt International Institute for Music. 

The Mendelssohn concerto presented here was originally released on a Urania disc coupled with a different pianist’s performance of the Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 1. Roloff gives a beautiful performance of this wonderful (and currently underplayed) concerto. His tone is warm, and his touch pearly. The pianist’s technique is in fine fettle – he handles the never-ending passagework and octaves with ease – and he has a strong command of Mendelssohnian style, letting the piece basically play itself without much interpretive interference. When he utilizes rubato, it is subtle – a slight hesitation at the top of a scale, or a poignant lingering here and there in the slow movement. I very much enjoyed his shaping of the octave passages in the final movement. I occasionally miss the blood-and-guts approach to this concerto found in the recordings of pianists such as Rudolf Serkin or his pupil Susan Starr (her live recording with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fiedler is likely the brawniest and most viscerally exciting Mendelssohn op. 25 on record), but Roloff offers a pleasingly lyrical alternative to that approach. This is thoughtful and sensitive playing. 

Given previous experiences with questionably labeled communist bloc orchestral recordings, I expected the orchestra to be quite rough and ready, but Karl Rucht (identified as Karl Kucht on the original LP) manages to draw a mostly tight performance from the orchestra. The winds/brass play in tune. (Rucht emigrated to the United States in the late 1950s and became a beloved conductor in Virginia, where he led the volunteer Arlington Symphony from 1960 to 1985.)

Dorothea Winand-Mendelssohn (1912-1997) was a student of Edwin Fischer. Although Jewish, she married a prominent “Aryan” lawyer and managed to evade arrest by the Nazis. During the war, she taught privately; her most important pupil was the late Christoph von Dohnanyi. She made several recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, but this selection of Mendelssohn solo works appears to be the only ones circulating today. [Many thanks to Forgotten Records owner Alain Deguernel for this information.]

I wish I could report that Winand-Mendelssohn’s playing in these items is as sophisticated as that of Helmut Roloff, but that is not the case. The Variations sérieuses is competent without being compelling as a recorded performance. Winand-Mendelssohn plays the notes, honors Mendelssohn’s written instructions (with the exception of some random inverse dynamics in several of the variations), and gives a pleasant enough account of the work, but one misses the vertiginous energy of Sviatoslav Richter and the rhetorical drama of the recently released performance of Abram Chasins. The final two whirlwind variations are played quickly but politely, with little bite to the tone. Without firing up Google, I can think of at least six or seven recorded performances of this piece that do a better job selling the music. If I heard this rendition in concert, I would enjoy it but would not remember any details of the performance half an hour later. 

The Andante that opens the Rondo Capriccioso is plodding. Winand-Mendelssohn projects the melodic line nicely, but there is little shape to it, and the left hand thuds inexorably away. At one point she takes a bit of time in the right hand, but does not correspondingly allow the left hand to breathe; the left hand thus hits a rhythmic wall, hanging midair until beginning again in the following bar. The music of this Andante that can sound exultant in the hands of a truly great pianist seems lifeless here. The speed of the Rondo portion of the piece is impressive, but the tempo is too fast for the pianist to play 100% cleanly (the left hand occasionally lags slightly behind the right in the various repetitions of the Rondo’s A theme). There are some small smudges in the arpeggio sections and wrong notes in a handful of chords. This piece and the Caprice were originally released on 78rpm records by Deutsche Grammophon, so the small mistakes are forgivable (every pianist hits a few clinkers in this particular piece), but the musicianship is just not compelling.

The Caprice suffers a similar fate, with the initial Adagio section given a quite literal rhythmic performance, and the Presto con fuoco played quite presto, but with little fuoco. The “second theme” of the Presto is marked “con calore” in my score, but Winand-Mendelssohn plays it daintily, ignoring the long crescendo, forte, and szforzando markings in the score. The concluding part of the score is played with more fire, but again, there are stronger performances of the music out there. 

Richard Masters