Amongst all the ‘Great Pianists of the 20th Century’ in Philips’s munificent new collection, Shura Cherkassky must count as the outstanding maverick. The booklet-note quotes him appositely: ‘Some people like my playing, and some people perhaps don’t. But I don’t think anybody can call me boring!’ He was quite right; and the contentious reason why some liked him and why some didn’t also explained why he was (almost) never boring. It was that when the mood seized him, as often it did, he liked to take the most reckless imaginative liberties with his music.
Spur-of-the-moment liberties, most of all – with tempos, with dynamics, with characterization; perhaps never to be repeated, but beautifully executed on the spot. In any Cherkassky recital, you waited for them with bated breath. In ‘big’ classical and romantic works he was somewhat more decorous and circumspect; in shorter pieces, and particularly the virtuoso transcriptions and encore-pieces that he loved to perform, anything might happen. It might be thrilling, or exquisitely delicate, or just perverse, according to your predilections. He was not a pianist who perfected ‘his’ interpretations laboriously over many years; he valued inspired flights of fancy far more highly.
One wishes that he had made more recordings. The trouble was that to capture the best of Cherkassky, someone with a lot of recording equipment would have had to follow him patiently from recital hall to hall to hall, hoping to catch his quirky inspirations whenever they took fire. Nobody did that, and his studio recordings only sometimes matched what he could do before a live audience. Philips has settled for a Cherkassky all-Chopin programme, compiled mostly from studio performances over the years: all the Etudes, recorded between 1953 and 1955 for EMI (the acoustic changes suddenly between one etude and the next), all the Op. 28 Preludes (with transfers taken from the ASV release) and the B minor Sonata (Decca, 1985), plus the Fantasie, the Barcarolle, the C minor Nocturne and the Mazurka, Op. 33 No. 2.
There are just a few duds, starting with his singularly dull, flat Revolutionary Study. Most of them are pieces in which one might have expected Cherkassky to excel, with his formidable old-fashioned technique and pearly touch – but they are also the ones which are musically simplest, depending upon sheer technical glitter to bring them off. By the 1950s Cherkassky was no longer much interested in such stuff; what stimulated his imagination was untried musical possibilities, maybe remote from anything like Chopin’s published prescriptions (as we know Chopin’s own playing often was). Whether faithfully orthodox or wildly unexpected – but lyrical, unemphatic: this later Cherkassky (he was born in 1911) preferred grace to noise – all the other pieces sing, dewily and thoughtfully, and like nobody else.
Cherkassky’s persona on the platform, and probably anywhere else, was arch and ultra-camp. He looked like Eugene Ionesco, with his plump, dapper little figure; the delighted wriggle of his bottom as he sat himself upon the piano-stool recalled Chabrier’s sly ‘Impalation’ aria in L’etoile. But little of that got into his playing; at his best, as in much of the music here, he was neither winsome, saccharine nor indulgent – just simply, deliciously immaculate, which is not the same thing at all. In the latest generation, there is nobody to match him in that vein.
From the same generation the Cuban Jorge Bolet, just three years younger, contrived at least to look like a dignified, mustachioed ambassador to the USA – which for some years he actually was, as the assistant military attache at the Cuban Embassy in Washington. Like the Odessa-born Cherkassky, who travelled to Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute to study with Josef Hofmann (also Odessa-born), Bolet went there too, to work with Godowsky and Moritz Rosenthal as well as Hofmann. Philips has allotted him another pair of CDs in the grand collection.
More than half of the time is devoted to a stunning 1974 recital that he gave in Carnegie Hall. Chopin’s 24 Preludes, here in a resoundingly ‘public’ vein (quite different from Cherkassky’s intimate discourse, but why not?), are prefaced by a colossal rendition of the Bach/Busoni Chaconne in D minor, and followed by a dazzling sequence of virtuoso fantasies – Strauss/Tausig, Strauss/Evler, several others from 1973, including some of his favourite encore-pieces.
In all of this, fiercely brilliant as much of it is, Bolet maintains his customary cool: slightly detached, with aristocratic gravitas, but utterly devoted to revealing everything that the music contains, including any virtuoso excesses that may come along. As always, the chording and the balance of voices are luminous. There are a few wrong notes (as with Cherkassky too), and near the end of the G sharp minor Prelude he misses out two bars. I could have wished that one of his last performances in England, of Chopin’s B minor Sonata in St John’s, Smith Square (the BBC recorded it), had found its way into the Philips collection. I have heard no more beautiful performance of the work – nor any so slow; but that was because Bolet was so intent on showing us how ravishing every detail of this music is – even in slow motion. Philips gives us Bolet in his lusty prime; I loved him even more later.'