From an interview between
a pianist and his interlocutor; pianist
first.
It was awful. I
was going to say, "Who is this
pianist?" The truth is that I found
it very fast. I hated it. Much too fast.
Did you recognise yourself
in the performance?
Not at all.
Not in any of the details?
Well, in some of
the details. In the two solos. When
I hear it now, so fast and so straightforward
– I just can’t understand it. It loses
all meaning. Where one expects some
lingering, it is so metronomic.
The pianist was Claudio
Arrau (Conversations with Arrau
with Joseph Horowitz) and the performance
by which he was so disappointed was
this one, conducted by Basil Cameron
and recorded in London in 1947. Arrau’s
performances, hardly uniquely, grew
progressively more measured over the
years. The Cameron recording was faster
than the Giulini, which in turn was
faster than the Haitink; live performances
from the 1970s confirm the trend as
an absolute.
Part of the problem
as Arrau himself acknowledged may have
lain in his formative years. His teacher,
Martin Krause, didn’t like the Brahms
Piano Concertos and presumably didn’t
teach them; he certainly didn’t teach
them to Arrau. Consequently he came
to them rather late, maybe in his later
twenties, and this seems to have inculcated
a sense of doubt in his mind, even though
he was in his forties when he first
came to make this recording with Cameron.
One thing Arrau specifically noted in
his playing was the "superficial
excitement" which he explicitly
weighed against the "spiritual
values" that he found so singularly
lacking in his younger self’s performance.
Arrau generally denigrated much of his
youthful playing as "too fast"
and there was some critical evidence
that the Berlin critics thought so too.
Nevertheless this recording will strike
many listeners as following well-established
tempo norms and of demonstrating well-correlated
balances between drive and lyricism.
One can judge that
in the first movement where Arrau and
Cameron take almost the exact same tempo
as the slightly earlier 1945 Decca pairing
of Curzon and Jorda. The piano receives
rather too favourable a balance with
Arrau – just too far in front of the
orchestra for absolute comfort – but
the compensatory features are the auditory
clarity of Arrau’s passagework. He and
Curzon stress the maestoso elements
rather more so than the galvanisingly
fleet Backhaus with Boult in 1932, whose
drive would doubtless have horrified
Arrau. What one notices in the performance,
despite the pianist’s strictures, is
the ease of the shaping of melodic lines
and the detail Arrau’s points in his
constantly mobile and articulate left
hand. The slow movement sounds songful,
lyrical and intimate. Typically Arrau
couldn’t even bring himself to listen
to it ("Maybe it was Cameron who
pushed") but we can listen to his
stressing of the upper left hand voicings
and his altogether sympathetic playing
– even though the orchestral passages
are rather blunted by the recording.
The finale is certainly slower than
Curzon’s and it possesses strength and
power if not magnetic drive. The orchestral
basses sound rather lateral and spread
and, taking Arrau’s considered view
of the work, I would suppose that he
found in the finale a microcosm of the
greater faults in his reading; a lack
of the cumulative and inevitable ascent
to triumph implicit in the score. If
the concerto is an assertion of the
pianist’s physical and psychological
will – Arrau was well versed in psychoanalysis
– then his later performances would
better embody those qualities. At least
for him.
Coupled with the Concerto
is the Waldstein Sonata, another
1947 recording. This is in clear sound
but there are occasional shellac pops
and ticks. In the slow movement there
are also some laminate thumps. His playing
here is again leonine and measured and
has none of the Jovian banging about
sometimes inflicted on its quasi-orchestral
carapace. Instead there is a total avoidance
of simplistic gestures and a sense of
intense identification and involvement.
The Columbia 1956 remake is probably
better known than this decade-earlier
78 but the Philips cycle of the 32,
made in 1963, is the best known.
As I said there are
some imperfections in this transfer
and no notes at all – but Arrau admirers
will be able to live without them for
the sake of these two examples of a
self he later came to disavow but whose
virtues are still illuminating and necessary.
Jonathan Woolf
Claudio Arrau (piano) 