Records
Schnabel's Successor
By DAVID CAIRNS • 1114 PERFECTION in Mozart piano concertos is a utopian ideal. But Rudolf Serkin, who has re- corded several of the finest con- certos on Philips and Fontana labels, misses it by the narrow- est margin.
These are beautiful but tantalising perform- ances. Serkin seems to relax gratefully in the summer-school atmosphere of Perpignan (K.482, and a superb performance of Beethoven's Tin Miidchen oder Weibchen' cello variations with Casals) and Marlboro, Vermont (K.271 and K.414), where the orchestral playing can be rough but is rarely unmusical. If anything, he relaxes too much. The sweep and coher- ence of his interpretations are occasionally weakened by a dreaminess which forgets that the pianist is there to command as well as to beguile. In the first movement of K.482 there is a rhap- sodical, almost capricious, quality about his playing which contrasts too strongly with Casals's firm and incisive account of the opening tutti. In K.4I4 (a generous, warm-blooded but rhythmi- cally rather four-square performance) Serkin plays the cantabile tunes with more liberal use of accented notes than would be tolerable by Haskilian canons of excellence. Yet, more and more, these seem minor flaws. Serkin is tantalis- ing because he might so easily, one feels, have been even better. But he is so good as it is that complaints become in • the end irrelevant. His phrasing is unfailingly poetic• and creative. His ornaments seem to blossom spohtaneously. The Passage work is neither mechanical (as in flashily virtuoso hands) nor apologetic (the good-taste school), but treats each note as having musical value. If he is sometimes too retiring, he is never trivial. The slow movement of K.27I is wonder- fully done; indeed, the whole concerto is fine (by an odd acoustical trick, however, the tuttis on this .disc sound frequently out of tune; at times we seem to have wandered into the Musical Joke). But perhaps Serkin's finest concerto record is a Fontana disc combining K.453 and K.503; the one a most perfect work, with a subtlety of shifting shades and moods remarkable even for Mozart, the other a splendid but incomplete masterpiece, whose enormous design for some reason was never quite filled in. The lively and highly professional accompaniment of the Cleve- land Orchestra under Georg Szell seems to have put Serkin on his mettle. This is a record to return to many times.
As a Beethoven pianist Serkin, since Schnabel's death, has had no serious rival in the Western world. (That we do not recognise it in this country is our misfortune, not his.) His supremacy is grandly asserted in a new Fontana record of the Diabelli Variations, a performance of titanic power and nobility. Occasionally Serkin over- pedals, occasionally he is too dramatic for the remote, withdrawn, unearthly sadness of the music (for example, the long Largo variation in C minor) and occasionally he does not quite match its inspired madness—especially in the extraordinary vivace variation (No. 27) where sforzato Bs and C sharps collide violently high up on the keyboard. But these are rare instances. In variation after variation he strikes deep into the mysteries of this wonderful work. The scale, control and sonorousness of his playing are re- markable. The dramatic variations thunder with tremendous insistence. But he can be still as well; the Andante Fughetta (No. 24) achieves an effect of Bach-like, sublimely imperturbable calm. And in the last Variation, where Beethoven, like Bach in the Goldberg, finally comes through, after all the struggle and the mastery, to a kind of holy simplicity, the performance, too, seems to shed a burden of knowledge and decision and allows the music to carry it innocently forward to the end. Listening to this record, it is no longer pos- sible to regard the Diabelli Variations, as some have done, as a gigantic technical exercise, a monstrous whim that blew up one variation into thirty-three, a laborious pleasantry to give Diabelli's unsuspecting waltz the fright .of its life, or as anything but one of the profoundest and most far-ranging masterpieces in all music.
Brahms's two sets of Paganini Variations have also been commonly thought of as 'forbidding' and fundamentally 'technical.' This is a lazy atti- tude. Compared to Beethoven's, they may be mediocre., But apart from a dull patch half-way through the second set, they are full of that strong mixture of passionate vigour and deep melan- choly that stamp Brahms's rougher but more in- spired early works. Julius Katchen plays the more strenuous variations brilliantly. He is an octave player of formidable power and precision, which in early Brahms, means a great deal; his glissandi in the second set have to be heard to be believed. But the performance as a whole lacks the massive strength of Egon Petri's pre-war re- cording. This is partly because of Katchen's over- careful approach to the lyrical variations. In lyrical music he has not learnt to relax and let the current carry him. The 'sheer apparatus of his technical skill and intellectual grasp make him self-conscious; he sacrifices breadth to cleverness, and his rubato is even guilty of what Shaw described as the worst of all sins of rubato —that of sounding. as if the pianist is trying to play in strict time but is hampered by the sticking of the keys. All the same, with an uneven but stimulating account of the Handel Variations on the other side, this is a record worth hearing.
So is a Pye recording of Bach, Haydn and Beethoven by the Rumanian pianist Mindru Katz. The Haydn Arietta and Twelve Variations is pleasant but routine stuff, but Beethoven's Thirty-two Variations, until invention runs dry shortly before the end, are splendid. Though the transcriptions of the Toccata in D (Busoni) and Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (Fischer) are rather tiresome, liable to break out in superfluous chord clusters and ponderous octaves, Katz plays them in such a strong, clean and unaffectedly eloquent style that they are almost purged of offence. The transcription of Nun konun' der Heiden Heiland, by Kempff, is much more re- strained and effective, but finely though Katz plays it, this supreme chorale prelude needs to be heard on an organ. In spite of rhythmic unsteadiness, Schweitzer's performance of it (Philips) is to be preferred to that of Jeanne Demessieux (Decca); it is more spacious and deeper in feeling. His record also includes 0 Mensch bewein' dein' Siinde gross, richly played, whereas Jesus Christus unser Heiland, on the Demessieux record, is an example of Bach in a vein of purely mechanical cleverness. But Schweitzer's clumsy and turgid account of the D minor Toccata and Fugue should never have been reissued.
Previous page
