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These were the last
recorded documents bequeathed by Sergio
Fiorentino. He spent time recording
in Berlin and works by Schumann, Schubert
and Debussy will appear in due course.
These Liszt performances derive from
sessions on 18th and 19th
October 1997. He died the following
year. Additionally this constitutes
Volume VIII in APR’s invaluable and
enriching series, one that has given
renewed impetus and emphasis to those
who hold Fiorentino in esteem.
Fiorentino had a big
technique that remained intact until
the end. He managed to cultivate transparency
of texture when he wanted to, wide dynamics
which were never superficial, never
forced through the tone and was quite
without egocentricity. His clarity was
accompanied by poetry and, as he grew
older, a powerful introspection. Though
his repertoire was extensive he returned
time and again to Liszt and we can chart
the journey he took in the Sonata from
his earlier years when he was taped
by Concert Artist to this last recording.
First though one meets his heroic encounter
with the Ballades, No.1 in D flat major
and No.2 in B minor. In the First Fiorentino
fuses will-o’-the-wisp with a jazzy
sounding march section animated all
the while by beautiful right-hand tracery.
The Second, indissolubly linked in my
mind with Horowitz and with Kentner,
has some subterranean bass roars as
explicit as Coleridge’s caverns, ‘measureless
to man’. There is much that is inspiringly
dramatic here even if some may prefer
mid-period Kentner’s sheer generosity
and warmth.
Funérailles
is, in Fiorentino’s hands, marmoreal
and adamantine and under considerable
pedal when it opens. Textures are also
thickened. Much is gloriously poetic
but equally, despite the nobility and
the heroism and grandeur, this lacks
the ‘charge’ of such as, say, Katchen’s
1957 recording. There the rhythmic tension
is inescapable and galvanic; here less
so. In La Leggierezza we can contrast
two Last Testaments, Barere’s from 1951
and this Fiorentino. Barere’s capricious
rhythm and rubati are part of an eruptive
pianistic persona. Fiorentino’s is a
more austere and august approach though
one that tends to abjure rubati here
in a way that, say, even Arrau in Berlin
in 1928 didn’t. Waldesrauschen is much
associated with Lamond and for those
with a taste for interior and straighter
Liszt playing, Harold Bauer (amongst
many others of course). Fiorentino here
conjures a sheer halo, a gloriously
romanticised cocoon of sound. Lamond
however prefers sobriety, direction
and a sense of line; Bauer even more
so than Lamond, and the perils of Fiorentino’s
approach are ones of compromising the
spine of the rhetoric.
Which brings us to
the Sonata; the grand signing off for
Fiorentino’s Liszt. What one feels about
it will depend on how acutely one responds
to Fiorentino’s very personal, late
vision of the Sonata. The strange, hugely
italicised, granitic opening, fearfully
slow and malign, is personalised to
a remarkable degree. He responds to
the powerful challenges with astonishing
fervour but also favours some thickening
of the bass and, on occasion, a wash
of pedal. He finds a kind of desperate
beauty in the Grandioso section where
his tonal resources are at their most
fully developed and declamatory strength
in the Andante sostenuto. He "times"
things with acute perception; much is
wonderful. And yet when one turns back
to his earlier
recording, made for Concert Artist
we find a clearer and leaner performance.
It is perhaps the difference between
optimistic portent and retrospective
reflection and the difference between
the two is the distance travelled. And
I have to say that it’s not simply for
the bewildering opening alone I find
myself drawn back more to the younger
Fiorentino – though the older man’s
recording is, notwithstanding his death
soon after, still deeply moving. As
indeed is much in these valedictory
but powerfully human, thus flawed, recordings.
Jonathan Woolf
Sergio Fiorentino (piano)