Asked – surely somewhat surprisingly in these European Union days – if it was not a ''little unusual'' for a French pianist to record Schumann and Brahms, Thibaudet replied (in an interview included in the booklet) that his mother was German, and that he has always loved that country's romantic repertory even though never before committing it to disc. What we're now primarily given is a refreshingly individual, though never quirky, display of imaginative vitality in the two most virtuosic works for solo piano that Schumann and Brahms ever wrote.
Predictably the technical challenges of Brahms's Paganini Variations hold few fears for him. Even Horowitz once admitted that in Liszt's Faust Waltz he'd heard Thibaudet's fingers do things that his own couldn't in dexterity, clarity of articulation and general command. Here, I particularly enjoyed Thibaudet's featherweight velocity in mercurial, scherzando-like contexts such as Nos. 3, 6 and 13 in the first book, and still more, Nos. 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 11 in the second – only rivalled in my own recent experience by Kissin's almost supernatural sleight-of-hand in a Royal Festival Hall performance last April. But never is virtuosity an end in itself. What surprised and pleased me most was Thibaudet's readiness to relax and revel in the romance, the mystery, the lyrical charm and the sheer tonal seductiveness of the less demonstrative, the more personally expressive, variations. Some listeners may of course find his whole approach too fancifully Gallic, insufficiently Germanic. But more than one road leads to Rome, and I suspect that even Brahms himself would succumb to the spring-like allure of this one.
Schumann's Arabeske, delectably liquid (despite its over-hasty second A minor episode) brings brief respite before the Etudes symphoniques, which, like nearly everyone today, Thibaudet plays in the posthumously published 1861 edition (reinstating the two numbers excluded by Schumann in his own 1852 revision though retaining its tautened finale). His leisurely unfolding of the theme, followed by an uncommonly brisk first variation (marked only un poco piu vivo) typifies his immediacy of response to every changing mood, which once more, as in the Brahms, results in a reading perhaps more memorable for variety than continuity. But again his fingers sing as finely as they sparkle. He wisely plays the five posthumously published, rejected early variations as a separate group, afterwards, rightly reserving his most intimately poetic revelations for the last two, both beautifully done. Sound reproduction throughout is at once natural and never too forward for comfort in your own room. R1 '9510085'