Edwin Fischer, writing in 1929, said that it was Busoni and Richard Strauss who “first proclaimed to our generation the true meaning of Mozart”. At that time much of Mozart was undervalued and misunderstood. The piano concertos, in particular, far from being celebrated as one of his highest achievements, were little known, with only a few of them regularly played. It was Fischer and Artur Schnabel, and among conductors Erich Kleiber and Bruno Walter, who spread the word and became the founding fathers of modern Mozart performance. Something of Fischer’s force and his crusading zeal lives on in Alfred Brendel and Daniel Barenboim, his students, inspired by his example.
A special contribution that Fischer made to the rehabilitation of Mozart was to revive the practice of performance directed from the keyboard. In this century he seems to have been the first to do so – a salute, then, to him as a pioneer. With the chamber orchestra he founded in Berlin in the early 1930s he gave cycles of the Mozart, Bach and Beethoven concertos which were legendary. On this first APR Mozart volume of his concerto recordings his own orchestra features only in the D major Rondo (K382), recorded in 1936, but the quality reveals at once why it was so admired. As to directing from the keyboard, the 1933 recording of the D minor Concerto with the LPO shows that Fischer was not only extraordinarily good at it – there is no hint of strain or of ‘holes’ appearing because of the different claims on his attention – but that he was a real conductor who could communicate his belief in the music and make something happen. In the words of his pupil, Gerald Kingsley, who observed how it was done, “the result was pure chamber music with a real personality in charge”.
There is good sound and balance and a very acceptable range of dynamics and sonority throughout this disc. And in the D minor Concerto especially one notes all sorts of orchestral touches for which Fischer must have been responsible – telling, germane, integrated. As in Fischer’s playing, the links between sound and expression are of the closest; there is nothing merely to agitate the surface. The performance of the middle movement Romanze, at an ideal tempo and without any of the customary inflation of its sentiment that leads so quickly to heaviness, is a model.
I can imagine that at this time of his life Fischer’s pianism was at its best. Although his fingers aren’t immaculate in the finale, he does say an amazing amount with them. A regret only that, in the finales of both the big concertos and occasionally in the first movement of the E flat (K482) as well, he is sometimes in so much of a hurry to welcome what’s coming next that he tumbles forward and trips. Or is that nervousness? In his later years it could affect him quite badly, but the lapses of control here aren’t serious. Regard them, perhaps, as the down-side of his spontaneity and rejoice in the freshness of what he does, which is glorious. There is more to his Mozart than freshness, of course. As he said: “one should experience the music with imagination and feeling … Mozart is not sweetness or artistry, Mozart is the touchstone of the heart”.
My other regret, which may not bother you, is that he was an unreconstructed Mozartian when it came to cadenzas – unreconstructed in the sense that he regarded this part of the concerto movement as belonging to him, not to Mozart. He whizzes around all over the place and considerations of what might be fit, or of what Mozart in his day might have expected, do not apply. Odd really, when he seems to be in a state of grace pretty permanently elsewhere. And for a sample of that I would pick out his first solo in the slow movement of the E flat Concerto (track 5). One could not ask for it to be better played.
Nor could these 1930s recordings be better presented. My only criticism is that the pause before the Andantino in the last movement of the E flat Concerto, where there must have been a side-break on the old 78s, is a mite too long. Two more volumes in this series are expected from APR in the course of the year and I much look forward to them.'