“I am startled, occasionally,” pianist
Benno Moiseiwitsch once admitted, “to find "intelligence" used
as the antithesis of "feeling", as though the
two played against each other. Nothing could be further
from the truth. No intelligent interpretation is lacking
in emotional values … [D]epending on gifts and degree
of maturity, some natures emphasize brain over heart.
Where such an imbalance occurs, it must be corrected
by conscious and concentrated application to emotional
content.”
In that statement and others like it, Moiseiwitsch
made it clear that he considered the printed score, on
its own, an insufficient guide. He believed, rather,
that any interpreter of the music of Chopin, for example,
required “a sound knowledge of Chopin's life, his moods;
what he was experiencing and feeling when he wrote that
particular work; its relation to his work as a whole,
etc. One tries to reconstruct all this, and then to apply
it”.
Of course, such subjectivity contradicts
any thought of there being such a thing as a standardised
interpretation. Indeed, Moiseiwitsch went on to explain
that, in approaching a work, he preferred trying out
a variety of what he called “shades of meaning” before
hitting upon the one that he found most personally satisfying
at that particular moment in time.
It was perhaps that same constantly shifting
subjective viewpoint that explains the chequered history
of his attempts to record Chopin’s multifaceted Préludes,
for none of his early ventures - in November 1921, December
1921, May 1922, July 1922, October 1922 and April 1924 – ever
emerged from inside the studio walls. Only in 1948,
after playing the full set on tour in Australia, did
Moiseiwitsch achieve a recording that was – with some
retakes of Préludes 16-18 and 22-24 the following year
- to his own artistic satisfaction.
Many pianists come to this music with strengths
particularly suited to some of the pieces but most definitely
not to others. But by bringing his interpretations to
the studio relatively late in his career when he was
almost 60 years old – though still at his technical peak – Moiseiwitsch
offers us the keenest insights of both brain and heart,
even though they may well be differently proportioned
from one individual Prélude to another. The result is
a performance that, while typically refined, is utterly
alive, responsive and flexible. Nearly 60 years after
it was recorded, it continues to put many later competitors
in the shade.
Booklet writer Jonathan Summers chooses
probably the most apposite adjective when he observes
that this is one of the most
satisfactory sets
of Préludes overall - not in the schoolmaster’s meaning
of “average” but in the literal sense that this is a
performance for life that provides complete aesthetic
satisfaction.
The recordings of the four Ballades (that
of no.4 was never commercially released) come from two
different phases of Moiseiwitsch’s career, but one would
be hard pressed to notice distinctions in either general
artistic approach or, indeed, the quality of the recorded
sound as expertly remastered by Ward Marston. Chopin’s
eclectic literary inspiration – with stories ranging
from the doomed love of a water spirit for a mortal to
treasonous shenanigans among the medieval Teutonic Knights
of Lithuania - means that the Ballades are more episodic
and less purely atmospheric than the Préludes. As such,
they pose rather less complex interpretative challenges
to performers. Moiseiwitsch offers here, nonetheless,
accounts of some subtlety and complete integrity, after
which the familiar melodies of the Fantaisie-Impromptu
op.66, recorded in the best sound of all, round off a
worthwhile disc, the twelfth in Naxos’s fine series that
pays tribute to this much loved soloist.
Rob Maynard
Reviews of other Moiseiwitsch recordings on Naxos Historical
Benno
Moiseiwitsch (piano) 
