Pianists and the Need for Originality

It is rare for any of the new pianists--launched in almost alarming quantity by the recording companies--to catch on with impresarios, with the public, or even with the companies that launched them.

For proof, visit any large record store and riffle through the “deletions” bins, stocked no longer with LPs but with compact discs, usually by pianists.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious: To succeed, a pianist needs an arsenal that goes beyond accuracy and strength, commonplaces these days.

More than any other instrumentalist, the pianist must be an original to attract our attention. And once in a generation (at best) we may find one as subtly original as an Alicia de Larrocha, to say nothing of an inspired eccentric like Sviatoslav Richter.

The latest recording by the reclusive, unpredictable Richter (approaching his 75th birthday) offers Beethoven’s vast “Diabelli” Variations (Philips 422 426), taken from a 1986 recital in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

It represents Richter’s artistry at its most enthralling: deeply pondered, at times ponderous, dare-all in terms of rhythmic freedom, dynamic variety and extremes of tempo. At the conclusion of Beethoven’s and Richter’s “Diabelli” Variations--this is music that most emphatically does not speak for itself--one has experienced not only stunning self-expression, but a huge, indivisible structure, rather than 30-odd snippets.

Alfred Brendel’s artistry is of a less prepossessing, more hard-edged sort, as in his celebrated Schubert interpretations, which over the years grow increasingly removed from the scores’ sources in song.

Brendel is re-recording all the Schubert Sonatas for Philips, most recently the Sonata in C minor, D. 958, with the “Moments Musicaux” (422 076) and the Sonata in A, D. 959, with shorter pieces (422 229). Nothing here strikes these ears as being on a par with Brendel’s earlier versions of the same music, to say nothing of more lyric and dramatic performances by such younger Schubertians as Radu Lupu, Paul Berkowitz and Richard Goode.

Still, Brendel’s polished aloofness is preferable to the crudeness of young Singapore-born fortepianist Melvin Tan in the last two Schubert sonatas, in A and B-flat (EMI/Angel 49631).

Tan presented impressive credentials recently with a Beethoven sonata program for EMI/Angel. He shows an insensitivity, however, to the less pressurized requirements of Schubert, exemplified in playing which, when not rushed and cramped, is afflicted with a rubato so extreme as to suggest caricature.

By contrast, naturalness of expression is a quality we have long associated with de Larrocha. And if her latest recorded program of two big Schumann works, “Carnaval” and “Faschingsschwank aus Wien” with the Allegro in B minor (London 421 525) is on the casual side (by her standards), with some rhythmic unsteadiness in the faster portions of “Carnaval,” it does convey the charm and lyric breadth lacking in Soviet pianist Andrei Gavrilov’s flashy, hectoring treatment of the same large works, to which he adds a clamorous “Papillons” (EMI/Angel 49235).

The French pianist Reine Gianoli (1915-1979), a pupil of Alfred Cortot, was cherished at home and all but unknown abroad. Her 1974 recordings of the Schumann solo piano canon are only now beginning to appear in the U.S., via the Ades label, six of a projected nine volumes having thus far been released here.

Gianoli is a big player, able to encompass the incendiary passions of the C-major Fantasy (13.244) and consistently, colorfully on the mark in the fanciful jabs of “Kreisleriana” on a disc shared with the exquisite “Bunte Blatter” (13.246). But she occasionally substitutes pensiveness- cum -rubato where ingenuousness is called for, such as in the Opus 12 “Fantasiestucke” (13.247).

Gianoli harnesses the sprawl of the Opus 22 Sonata (13.245) within the context of a grandly scaled interpretation, but here Ades’ tubby sonics militate against linear clarity. And while the Opus 7 Toccata lacks drive, the remainder of that program (on 13.242) pleases with a graceful “Abegg” Variations and a shapely rendering of the Symphonic Etudes.

RCA continues to work away at creating The Legend of Barry Douglas, this time saddling him with an unflattering, directionless vehicle requiring interpretive genius on the Richter level to hold our attention: the elephantine Grand Sonata, Opus 37, of Tchaikovsky (RCA 7887).

The Irish pianist seems bewildered by the score’s waywardness and rhetoric, which is understandable. No sympathy from this quarter, however, for his rigid, charmless projection of five of Tchaikovsky’s wistful “Seasons.”