Volume 2 in Pearl's ongoing ''The Art of Paderewski'' (Vol. 1 was reviewed 11/91) continues a dubious legend, and the accompanying notes are a truly daunting mix of hearsay and hyperbole. The transfers of the recordings, some of which date from 1911, are excellent with an admirable refusal to dim true sound-quality in the interests of silent surfaces, but the performances, as on RCA's recent reissue (see above), are only intermittently grand or stylish.
In Couperin Paderewski is affectionate if rhythmically unpoised, though his Schubert/Liszt is unquestionably exuberant and sparkling. So, too, is much of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, fleshed out with this or that textual emendation for added brilliance and expansiveness, very much in the style of the time. For the cadenza Paderewski offers a brief flourish (a disappointing alternative to Rachmaninov's outrageously prolonged outburst on his recently reissued recording on RCA—see page 108), though there is delightful compensation in La leggierezza with added decoration ad libitum, and a final spray of stardust that presumably derives from Leschetizky, Paderewski's teacher and mentor.
The concluding Vivacissimo of the Tenth Rhapsody (the one with the cimbalom imitations and soaring and plunging glissandos) is technically queasy and La campanella (heard here in the 1927 rather than 1912 recording) has both inept and authentic additions. The Wagner/Schelling is a bloated and indulgent composition though it is given, as I suggested in my review of Paderewski's RCA disc, with high romantic fervour. The Stojowski and Schelling solo items (both composers were Paderewski pupils) suggest little beyond an unendearing sentimentality.
More generally, all these performances are imprecise in one degree or another, and a tendency to substitute bluster and rhetoric for accuracy is surely significant. On record, unaccompanied by the famous Paderewski presence, the spell works infrequently.'