ON 4 May 1968 George Szell presented a portrait of himself to Emil Gilels "in admiration and in gratitude for the unforgettable experience of our Beethoven recording week in Cleveland. In sincere friendship."
Four days had been all that they had needed to record the five concertos and three additional piano works: the Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme in C minor, the Six Variations on the Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens and the Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance by Paul Wranitzky.
On 29 and 30 April and 1 and 4 May, the record producer Paul Myers, who had worked on the CBS recordings by the Juilliard Quartet and Glenn Gould, assumed artistic control of this new project, which was recorded in Severance Hall and involved a team of three sound engineers, Frank Bruno, Edwin Michalski and Edward Thomas Graham.
Myers had supervised all of the Cleveland Orchestra's recordings since 1963. All were distributed on the Epic Records label, a subsidiary of Columbia, which released them "in stereorama".
By 1968 the joint billing of Szell and Gilels was neither sensational nor politically significant, for by that date several delegations of Soviet artists had already been sent abroad and many of them were already well known to western audiences.
This was no longer the Khrushchev era. Moreover, Gilels had met Szell in 1966, a week after his fiftieth birthday, while undertaking his sixth tour of the United States.
His visit took him to Boston, where he gave a solo recital; to New York, where he performed under Ormandy and Maazel; to Chicago, where he appeared with Jean Martinon; and to Philadelphia, where Ormandy was again the conductor.
The tour had started in Cleveland, a visit that marked the first collaboration between Gilels and Szell. Nailing their colours firmly to their mast, they performed Beethoven's Third and Fourth Piano Concertos.
In the course of his career, Gilels visited the United States on a dozen occasions. He had initially been scheduled to make his North American debut in the Soviet Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, but the global conflict and then the Cold War intervened and it was not until 3 October 1955 that Gilels first performed on American soil, playing Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto in Philadelphia.
Five years before the North American debut of his contemporary, Sviatoslav Richter, who, like him, had been in Heinrich Neuhaus's class at the Moscow Conservatory, Gilels - People's Artist of the USSR, the holder of the Stalin Prize and a Hero of Socialist Labour - had been the first musician whom the Soviet authorities had allowed to travel to the New World since Prokofiev had returned to Europe in 1936.
Gilels was also the soloist when the Kremlin-backed Moscow State Symphony Orchestra became the first Soviet orchestra to be invited to America. The concert, which took place in New York, was conducted by Konstantin Ivanov.
Almost a quarter of a century later Gilels made his last public appearance in the United States at Carnegie Hall. The date was 16 April 1983. For its part, Szell's orchestra had visited Europe under the auspices of the American State Department, appearing during the spring of 1965 in Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi, Prague and Bratislava.
The tour was a triumph. In Moscow the players were called back on to the Bolshoi stage no fewer than twenty times. This was also Pan Am's first commercial flight to the Soviet Union since vice-president Nixon's visit in 1959.
On closer inspection, the Szell-Gilels partnership was not an obvious one. Quite apart from any technological considerations, both artists had already recorded all of Beethoven's concertos: Szell with his favourite pianist, Leon Fleisher (1959-61), Gilels with André Vandernoot, André Cluytens and Leopold Ludwig (1954-57).
There was also the question of rights. Szell had refused to sign an exclusive contract and had recorded for Philips, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, whereas his players were all under contract to Columbia.
This exclusive contract between the Cleveland Orchestra and CBS expired in September 1967 and was renewed only until 1969 and on worse terms.
Cleveland's manager, Beverly Barksdale, had grown increasingly exasperated at the way in which his orchestra was being treated by Columbia, which seemed to him to prefer the New York and Philadelphia orchestras, and so he demanded an agreement with EMI that would allow Gilels to record the Beethoven concertos with Szell.
(This recording for EMI was followed by two other celebrated releases, both of them made in May 1969: the Brahms Double Concerto with Rostropovich and David Oistrakh; and the same composer's Violin Concerto with Oistrakh.)
The recording sessions in the spring of 1968 were meticulously prepared. Indeed, an admiring press noted, not without a hint of irony, that the orchestra was giving seven concerts that week but that the general public was admitted to only two.
Over a twenty-year period, Szell — Richard Strauss's former protégé at the Royal Opera in Berlin had transformed a decent provincial band that had been thrown into disarray by the Second World War and turned it into one of the most reliable orchestras in the world.
When he heard the Cleveland Orchestra perform in Lucerne in August 1967, Karajan, no less, described it as "indisputably the best of all American orchestras".
In its heyday, it included a number of exceptional principals: Rafael Druian, Abraham Skernick, Lynn Harrell and David Perlman (strings); Myron Bloom (horn); John Mack (oboe); Robert Marcellus (clarinet); Maurice Sharp (flute) and Cloyd Duff (timpani), to name only the most important.
As for Gilels, his stupefying schedule for this six-month period had taken him to Belgium, Poland, England, Scandinavia, the Ukraine, Sardinia, the Netherlands, the Baltic States and Siberia, presenting him with an opportunity to perform all the Beethoven piano concertos with conductors of the stature of Yevgeny Svetlanov, Eugen Jochum, Kirill Kondrashin and Witold Rowicki.
Szell and Gilels hit it off at once, and by the end of October John Coveney, acting on behalf of Angel Records, EMI's American subsidiary, was able to present Szell with the first copies of their five-disc boxed set. The catalogue number was SE-3731.
Gilels's American season ended on 2 July 1968. Before returning to Europe, he used the opportunity of a stopover to meet Henry Z. Steinway, the director of the firm of piano manufacturers, and to give Steinway's younger daughter, Susan, an enormous Russian doll.
By 3 August his new season was already under way with a recital in Lipetsk. As for Szell, his new season was notable for his recordings of orchestral excerpts from the Ring, Haydn's Symphony No. 96 and Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
By the winter he had accepted the post of interim adviser to the New York Philharmonic until such time as a new music director was found to replace Leonard Bernstein.
Gilels and Szell were to share a platform on only one more occasion, when they performed Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto together with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival on 24 August 1969.
And Gilels was to appear only once more in Cleveland in the wake of Szell's death on 30 July 1970. (Sir John Barbirolli and Ionel Perlea had both died the previous day.)
Wanting to pay homage to Szell, Gilels had expressed his desire to play all five Beethoven concertos in Severance Hall, a wish that was granted to him on 18 and 27 January 1977. The conductor was Lorin Maazel.
