The recordings by which we get to know a loved work
always hold a special place in our affections, or shall we say our memories?
When I was in my mid-teens there were still people around who were shedding
their 78s collections, and most gramophones then were still able to
play them; and so it was that I came into a set of the Lipatti Grieg
Concerto and played it again and again. Every bar of it seemed wonderful,
both the music and the playing, and it has remained ever since as an
ideal against which all others were judged. I have the 78s still but
I haven’t had the means to play them for many a year. It was therefore
with more than usual interest that I turned to the present CD transfer
(of course, the recording has seldom been out of the catalogue in all
the years between but I never found the courage to take a trip down
this particular memory lane).
Truth to tell, it all sounds quite different now. I
had forgotten that the recording, while doing fair justice to the delicacy
of Lipatti’s touch in the softer moments, was clattery and inclined
to distortion in the big moments; not for the first time, the CD transfer
seems to bring out both sides of the coin. But what I had remembered
was an Olympian calm which I don’t find here. I suppose that, gradually
modifying my own concept of the work, I had applied my newly evolved
view back to the supposed model. Lipatti is supremely beautiful and
poetic in the quieter moments, but his reading is also more impetuous
than we usually hear, a very dashing young man’s performance. And there
is no getting away from the fact that Galliera takes a Palm-court view
– hear how he glosses over the first movement’s second subject, concluding
it with an enormous rallentando, after which Lipatti enters with the
tempo he wants. Nor does the long introduction to the slow movement,
again swiftish with the wrong kind of rubato, give adequate preparation
for the ineffable poetry with which Lipatti himself dresses the remainder
of the movement. All things considered, of the tried old classics, I
think that perhaps Solomon and Curzon wear their years better. And remember
that, if you really want to know Grieg, there’s Järvi’s
6-CD pack on DG 471 300-2.£35 review
It has a performance of the Concerto by Lilya Zilberstein which
is very appealing in its fresh simplicity and, having made the outlay,
you’ll have everything Grieg wrote for orchestra in wholly admirable
performances.
The Chopin performance won’t have such time-honoured
associations since it turned up rather more recently. It was in late
1971, in fact, that EMI put out what was said to be a 1948 Swiss broadcast
under an unknown conductor. The November 1971 EMG Monthly Letter – of
glorious memory – commented that "although sonically rather dim
it is possible to discern the distinction of Lipatti’s playing, and
this calm, measured performance is pure poetry compared to some of the
slick pianistic utterances one so frequently hears these days".
I’d second all that except, oh dear, there’s always a "but",
not long afterwards EMI had red faces that were as nothing in comparison
with the egg smeared all over the face of the anonymous EMG critic (and
plenty of others too) when it turned out that the performance was not
by Lipatti at all but by a not undistinguished Polish lady whose double-barrelled
name escapes me in this moment [it was Halina
Czerny-Stefanska - LM]. Then, later on, the real Lipatti performance
we have here turned up, but all this raises a lot of questions. If a
performance was fine enough to be issued and to have all that praise
heaped upon it by experienced critics when it was thought to be by Lipatti,
why does the same performance deserve total oblivion when it turns out
to be by someone else? For that matter, if a goodly percentage of the
recorded performances that circulate were not really by the artists
they claim to be by, just how many of us would be any the wiser?
My father has entertained over the years a number of
amusing "conspiracy" theories concerning mainly conductors
who turn up frequently on records but who you never actually see conducting
a concert. One such was Leopold Ludwig – "such an obviously made-up
name". Well, I read Ludwig’s obituary somewhere; he died, ergo
he had lived. Another was "this chap Peter Maag" and I had
to assure my poor father I’d really seen Maag conduct in Milan. Well,
actually, what I saw was an elderly white-haired gentleman who rolled
up to conduct a performance of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony strikingly
unlike the famous Decca recording, but it would have been grist to my
father’s mill if I’d told him that. He even had a theory about
Vernon Handley, and imagine how he chortled with glee when he finally
bought a ticket for a Handley concert and then Handley was indisposed
and his place taken by another conductor! In the end we can only listen
with faith, a dose of suspicion and the reflection that the likelihood
of all the record labels being wrong is on a level with Bertrand Russell’s
example of an improbable but irrefutable hypothesis; namely that the
world was created five minutes ago complete with memories.
So back to the real Lipatti and the sound is pretty
poor, suggesting an amateur off-the-air job, and Ackerman’s opening
tutti is so lackadaisical that one wonders why Lipatti didn’t walk out
on him. But thereafter the orchestra hardly counts and Lipatti is quite
wonderful, uncovering a wealth of poetry in what can seem to be a rather
youthfully garrulous composition. Somehow you can tell that Lipatti’s
soul identified with even minor Chopin more than with Grieg.
So this is another essential historical recording,
no doubt about it. But how about coupling the real Lipatti Chopin performance
with the one that wasn’t? Now that would give us food for thought.
Christopher Howell
Dinu Lipatti (pianoforte),
Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra/Otto Ackermann (1), Philharmonia Orchestra/Alceo
Galliera (3)