These Brilliant sets are very variable over documentation.
Some have none at all, a few are quite detailed (for example the
Barshai Shostakovich Symphonies). This one has a booklet with
the first CD which contains brief but adequate notes to the music
in all 5 CDs and a synopsis of Grimaud’s career from which at
least the first page is omitted as it begins with 1990. This is
all the more regrettable when, as you can see, Grimaud’s many
achievements prior to that date include the recording of three
out of five of the present CDs, and I think that listeners without
other sources of information to hand would have liked to be told
that the pianist was just 15 when she recorded the solo Rachmaninov
disc. Not, I hasten to add, because allowances have to be made
("good stuff for a school kid") but because the fact
is so remarkable and, indeed, even the most discerning listener
unaware of the biographical details is unlikely to guess them.
The Rachmaninov solo disc at once proclaims,
alongside an extraordinarily well-equipped technique, the complete
naturalness of Grimaud’s talent. There is no exhibitionism, no
posturing, no empty rhetoric, just an ability to home in on the
essence of the composer and to present it without trappings. The
ebb and flow of the music is perfectly caught and the composer’s
often complex counterpoint is always clear, with the right relationship
between melody, counter-melody and accompaniment. Since the op.
33 Études-tableaux are not so well-known (the op. 39 set
contains several beloved of Richter, Horowitz et al) this is a
disc well worth having. The covers and notes are not very helpful
about what is played, stating that she plays 1-3 and 5-9 and leaving
it at that. If you look these pieces up in an encyclopaedia you
will find there are only six of them, so let me explain. Rachmaninov
originally intended a set of nine, but when he came to publish
them he dropped one in A minor, which he later gathered into op.
39 and which Grimaud does not play, and another two in C minor
and D minor respectively, which he left in limbo and which Grimaud
has reinstated here.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking disc for me
was the third, or at least it provoked my thoughts because just
before hearing it I had been reading Paul Shoemaker’s review of
some Liszt played by Tamás Vásáry. Vásáry,
according to Shoemaker, approaches Liszt and Chopin, not from
the point of view of someone well versed in all the music which
came after them, but plays Chopin as Schubert might have played
him and Liszt as he might have been interpreted by Clara Schumann.
Or by any other intelligent musician of the time well-versed in
the piano literature up till then. I must say my own impressions
of Vásáry have hitherto been negative but I had
not thought of listening to him in this light and look forward
to trying him again. I’m raising all this because it seems to
me that Grimaud is doing very much the same thing. Her Chopin
Ballade has a Schubertian songfulness and lilt which is far removed
from the post-Rachmaninovian neurosis often imposed on it. Don’t
mistake me, it is neither underplayed nor rhythmically rigid,
but the sort of rubato applied does not go beyond that which would
be natural in Schubert. Her Liszt, on the other hand, has the
sort of rhythmic continuity one would expect from a Beethoven
sonata, with the result that the piece (which in some hands can
degenerate into mere noise) is shorn of bombast and stands up
as a satisfying structure. Likewise Schumann’s sprawling First
Sonata is unusually convincing, especially in its first two movements
(there is little that can be done to save the messy finale).
This very fine disc illustrates the perplexity
which a musician in the late 1830s must have felt; with Beethoven
and Schubert barely a decade in their graves, here were three
composers striking out in remarkably different paths.
I had a few reservations near the start of Kreisleriana
– in the first piece the off-beat accents are so strong that the
first beat is lost and with it the sense of syncopation, and in
the second intermezzo of no. 2 the phrases are too separated for
the flow of the music – but I increasingly settled down to enjoy
a performance which enters equally into the feverish excitement
and the withdrawn poetry typical of Schumann. I won’t throw out
Horowitz and a host of others (there’s a phenomenal version of
just the first three by Gieseking once available on Forlane and
deriving from a Urania disc) but I’m glad to have it.
Brahms’s début as a sonata-writer (the
second sonata precedes the first by a year) is an uncharacteristic
experiment in Lisztian form; with its stop-go finale it may be
the one truly unsatisfactory piece the composer ever wrote. Grimaud’s
unfailing musicianship shows it in as favourable light as possible.
The Third Sonata is a much finer piece and has
encouraged some memorable readings on record. With the innocence
of youth, Grimaud seems to resolve interpretative problems by
not realising they exist (I wonder if life has been so unproblematic
in the ensuing years?). In comparison such rivals as the meticulously-textured
Stephen Hough (Hyperion) and the old wizard Earl Wild (Ivory Classics)
can seem, respectively, ponderous and quixotic. In the scherzo
there is a lilt to her rhythm which neither of the other two quite
capture.
The old adage was that you have to be fifty to
play Brahms. If the comment has any truth at all it would apply
to the late miniatures opp. 116-119, yet Grimaud gets sufficiently
close to the heart of op. 118 to give the lie to it. Even so,
when I turned to the version by Joyce Hatto (Concert Artists)
I realised that in this music the fact of having played it and
thought about it for so many years has its own advantages. Hatto
gauges exactly the right tempi for the slower pieces, no. 2 and
5 in particular, so that they flow without any hint of stickiness,
while her fires are still undimmed for the final page of no. 4.
But for me the real revelation of the session was listening to
Julius Katchen in this group. I am well aware that Katchen’s Brahms
has been hailed as one of the monuments of the LP era, but I have
always found his mixture of insights and gross rhythmic distortion
pretty well impenetrable. This time, in an early morning, having
slept on Grimaud and Hatto, something clicked and the pieces seemed
to be born into life as Katchen played them. Enthralling, though
I still maintain they are a bad model and should not be heard
too often!
The concerto disc is perhaps the least remarkable,
though you won’t regret acquiring it along with the others. The
Rachmaninov contains much that is natural and sympathetic in a
quietly understated way. If you find the second subject of the
last movement rather slow, it is exactly on the composer’s metronome
mark, but this may be a matter of chance rather than design since
the following passage in triplets falls well below Rachmaninov’s
marking and the music really does sag. The first movement of the
Ravel is a little too much pulled-about – I missed the patrician
glint of Michelangeli’s famous reading. Having praised Michelangeli
I suppose it would not be fair to say I was not entirely convinced
by Grimaud’s left-hand-before-right playing in the slow movement
(and several other times throughout these CDs), since he does
the same thing! I must say that the finale is the most successful
I’ve heard since Michelangeli – the sheer difficulty of the music
gets most pianists bogged down at various points but Grimaud seems
unruffled by it all. The conducting is decent, no more.
Grimaud has already re-recorded some of this
music; no doubt much else will follow. Piano-fanciers who wish
to catch up on the first recording of a major pianistic force
of today will be glad to snap them up so cheaply. Those who happen
upon the set in a supermarket and are simply attracted by the
possibility of increasing their knowledge of romantic piano music
could hardly hope for a more musical or sympathetic guide to it.
Christopher Howell
for
details 
Hélène Grimaud (piano)