Writing many years ago in that august publication, The Record Guide (Collins: 1955), the authors shrewdly noted how the Chopin waltzes require a historical perspective in performance, a quality above and beyond a democratic “rhythmical precision, a glossy technique and concert hall brio”. Later they celebrated music “in which emotion is permitted to suggest itself only through a veil of elaborate civility”.
Alas, such elegance largely eludes Peter Jablonski, a young pianist who often suggests that bluntness rather than discretion is the better part of valour. How rarely he explores the music’s full dynamic and poetic specturm, replacing its range with a generalized mezzo-forte to forte surface brio. True, he is more responsive to both Opp. 64 No. 2 in C sharp minor – most refined and elegaic of the waltzes – and to the querulous tone of Op. 69 No. 2 in B minor. But elsewhere (in Op. 64 No. 3 in A flat, for example) he shows an unsubtle sense of the waltz rhythm, a foursquare rather than stylish sense of three beats in the bar, and in the seductive double-note elaboration of Op. 70 No. 3 his playing lacks the necessary degree of fantasy and freedom.
More generally, Jablonski is relatively successful in the posthumously published juvenilia waltzes, though even here there is too little sense of how Chopin’s exuberance is so easily clouded by romantic unease, by that poetic ambiguity so central to his incomparable art. High hopes for the more extrovert A flat Polonaise are, however, quickly dashed. Rhythm remains solid and unbending and I doubt whether Liszt, if he had heard this performance, would have felt impelled to evoke “the hoofbeats of the Polish cavalry” in the central octave gallop.
The recording is excellent, but my advice is to stick to past glories from, above all, Cortot and Lipatti.'