Since recording much Mozart, Chopin and Schumann for Erato, Maria-Joao Pires has become a different and very great pianist. Here, beautifully and responsibly partnered by Previn and the Royal Philharmonic—the days of massacred tuttis and lax and indifferent orchestral partnerships seem mercifully remote—and recorded with the greatest warmth and clarity, she at last gets the treament she deserves. What gloriously imposing breadth as well as knife-edged clarity Pires brings to each phrase and note; absolutely nothing is taken for granted. To lift a phrase from Keats, she ''loads every rift of her subject with ore'' and the intricacy and stylishness of her rubato remind us that the inspiration behind the F minor Concerto was Constantia Gladkowska, a young singer and Chopin's first love. Listen to Pires's fioritura in the heavenly Larghetto or her way of edging into the finale's scintillating coda and you will gasp at such pianism and originality. Indeed, the opening of her finale may surprise you with its dreaminess (Allegro vivace?) but as with all great pianists, even her most extreme ideas are carried through with unshakeable conviction and authority.
Pires's 24 Preludes, too, remind us that she is the possessor of one of the most crystalline of all techniques. More importantly, her way with the more interior numbers among Chopin's teeming and disparate moods is of exceptional drama and intensity. Understatement plays little part in her conception and those who prefer the more classically biased playing of artists such as Pollini or Perahia (CBS, 1/76—nla) are in for some surprises. In No. 4, for example, her reading is intensely 'laden', the stretto climax super-charged, the entire performance virtually choked by its own emotion. Yet how memorably she allows the central unease of No. 13 to dissolve into tranquillity, and, returning to fire and fury, what rhetorical force she unleashes in No. 18. But, then, I could go on for ever, and space forbids. In short, you rarely hear Chopin playing of greater mastery or calibre. In her own scrupulously modern way Maria-Joao Pires surely embodies the spirit of the great pianists of the past; of Kempff, Edwin Fischer and, most of all, Alfred Cortot.'