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100 Definitive Recordings
Norman Lebrecht
Here are the most recent installments of
Norman Lebrecht's 100 Definitive Recordings
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CD 47: Chopin: Waltzes
Dinu Lipatti
EMI: Radio Geneva studios, July 1950
The Romanian pianist,
just 33 when he died,
made his precious few
recordings while suffering
from leukemia, but there
is nothing of the sickbed
about his blistering performances.
Lipatti's crisp,
witty articulation dispels the image of Chopin
as a morbid melancholic, though neither man
remained long in this world. There is a devilment
to the playing, an almost improvisatory
approach that derives from Lipatti's private
passion for hot jazz.
A powerfully-built man of wealthy parentage,
he spent the late 1930s in Paris with
Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger but wound
up starving in Switzerland in 1943. The
Geneva Conservatoire gave him a job and EMI
a record deal, but he was already deathly pale.
The arrival of the drug Cortisone in the summer
of 1950 gave him a burst of energy and
optimism that made even the moody Chopin
waltzes in minor keys sparkle with high spirits.
Sadly the remission was shortlived and he was
gone by Christmas. Unique among star
pianists, Lipatti always let the music speak for
itself.
CD 48: Horowitz
DG: NY, April 1985
Vladimir Horowitz had
more comebacks than
Lucifer. Every decade or
so, the demons would
take over and he would
be medicated or hospitalized
out of circulation.
Manic depressive and
awkwardly gay, he was the epitome of the
wacko pianist, living on a diet of boiled fish
and playing only at 4:30 in the afternoon. He
54 septembre 2005 september
was also the most natural of artists, blessed
with a touch that defied gravity and extended
notes beyond the remit of pedal power: once
heard, never forgotten.
His final comeback, in his 82nd year, was
captured on film by the Maysles brothers and
on disc by his lifelong RCA producer John
Pfeiffer, on hire to DG. The session in his
Upper East Side apartment took six afternoons
and evenings, but Horowitz sounded as
fresh throughout as he had when he first burst
onto the scene in 1920, springing from Russia
with his lifelong pal, violinist Nathan Milstein,
by order of Lenin's culture commissar.
No pianist has ever taken the Busoni transcription
of a Bach chorale so slowly, revealing
the giant edifice behind it, nor has anyone, the
composer included, filled Rachmaninov's G#
minor prelude with such foreboding. Mozart
and Chopin are treated as if they were
Horowitz's contemporaries, tormented romantics
in a bewildering world. This is the last
great record of a virtuoso recital, and its location,
in the pianist's living room, provides an
almost unbearable intimacy.
CD 49: Beethoven violin concerto
Fritz Kreisler
HMV: Berlin, September 1926
The sweet-toned Fritz
Kreisler is revered by violinists
as diverse as Nigel
Kennedy and Maxim
Vengerov. In a recent
study called Capturing
Sound: How Technology
has Changed Music
(University of California Press), author Mark
Katz credits him with changing the way violinists
play in the recording studio, keeping up a
long vibrato throughout the work. His cadenza
for the Beethoven concerto – the part
where soloists are expected to let their hair
down – was adopted as standard by less fertile
violinists; so much so that Hitler was
unable to ban it and merely had Kreisler's
name expunged from programmes.
Viennese by birth and temperament,
Kreisler had a sunny disposition, twinkling
through happy passages and dancing at the
very edge of schmaltziness in sentimental
pieces. In Beethoven, however, he was austere,
aware of the immensity of the concerto and
his own contribution to its legend. With Leo
Blech and the Berlin opera orchestra, his
approach is measured, unflustered and entirely
unostentatious. Personal quirks are imperceptible
and every note is set firmly in its
place, as if he intended this to be a record for
all time.
As for the cadenzas, they do exactly what
the composer expected – reflect back on what
has just been played and extrapolate putative
alternatives. Kreisler's is the benchmark
account of this concerto and, though he rerecorded
it with better sound in London ten
years later, the original is unsurpassably concentrated.
CD 50: Brahms: 1st piano concerto (D minor)
Artur Rubinstein/Chicago SO/Reiner
RCA: Chicago, April 17, 1954
Beaten by CBS to launching
the LP, RCA got in first
with stereo. After experimental
sessions in New
York with the audio-conscious
Leopold Stokowski,
the engineers went to
Boston to capture a Berlioz Damnation of
Faust with Charles Munch. The results were
spacious but ill-defined beside a good mono
recording. On they went to Chicago, where
the orchestra had a tough new music director
in Fritz Reiner, and the label's top-selling
pianist, Artur Rubinstein, to play the first
Brahms concerto.
Conductor and soloist did not see eye to
eye – they rowed over Reiner's imputation
that Chopin had been gay – but, aware of the
new technology, they produced a performance
in which orchestral colours sparkled and
glowed, and the piano was set realistically,
centre-left, instead of far ahead of the band,
as Rubinstein preferred. The technical team
taped the performance on three microphones,
each wired to a separate channel, overcoming
the boxiness of previous attempts. This was
the recording where stereo came of age. It
took another four years before the format was
released; the record industry was forced to
wait for domestic hi-fis to catch up.
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