SOUNDS AND VIEWS
Premieres to remember: an addendum
It seems that the data in the concluding part (i.e., Part V) of my recent series "Premieres to Remember" is incomplete, for pianist Roman Rudnytsky (born 1942) also participated in noted first performances. He did the British, Latin American and Australian premieres of the recently discovered Liszt Concerto No. 3 in E Flat (British premiere on November 4, 1990, with the Worthing Symphony only six months after the world premiere by pianist Janina Fialkowska).
The Latin American premiere of the Liszt score followed in 1992 and the Australian a year later, namely August 20, 1993, with the SBS Youth Orchestra in the Sydney Town Hall. The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), one of Australia's main TV channels, broadcast this performance in December 1993 as part of documentary titled "Discovering Liszt."
Concerto No. 3 is not as impressive as Nos. 1 and 2, for the score comes from a very young Liszt, still not fully mature and masterful. But it is genuine Liszt, who at that approximate time wrote an entire opera, now also being produced and re-evaluated.
Besides the Liszt, Mr. Rudnytsky attained a number of firsts connected with music of Ukraine. On March 26, 1974, he played the hauntingly beautiful "Slavonic Concerto" by Borys Liatoshynsky with the Edmonton Symphony in Canada. This was not only the first such performance in North America, but more importantly, it was the "de facto" unveiling of the work outside Ukraine.
A first of another kind occurred in the summer of 1966, when Mr. Rudnytsky became the first of any Ukrainian pianists of the West to perform in Ukraine after World War II. His recitals stirred Kyiv as well as Lviv (where the patriarch of composers Stanislav Liudkevych praised the young pianist). At that time Mr. Rudnytsky was the first to appear on TV in Zaporizhia in the role of keyboard artist from the West.
Roman, of course, always placed a high priority on piano works by his father, Antin Rudnytsky, himself an able pianist and accompanist, whose Piano Sonata on Themes of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen won first prize in Warsaw (1936). Roman was the first to perform most of such piano works by his late father.
Roman Rudnytsky, the recording artist, may be heard in works by Samuel Barber, Vasyl Barvinsky and Franz Liszt (among many other composers). He was first among our pianists to capture on vinyl all of the "Transcendental etudes" by Liszt, including the grandiose "Mazeppa." This major work had been performed in Ukrainian circles by Volodymyra Bozheyko, Taras Mykyscha and (much later) by Marta Shlemkevych, but Mr. Rudnytsky was first to record it commercially.
This, then, for the benefit of "completeness" - although little in the continuous process of creatively can ever be definitely completed. Composers will go on perfecting their art, while performers will follow in re-creating such achievements. Conductor Leopold Stokowski went on record claiming that singers, pianists or orchestras are never concerned merely with reproduction; they really have to create all over again, so that composers can live again in the time and space of concert halls.
Premieres to remember: an addendum
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 12, 1997, No. 2, Vol. LXV
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