Here is a unique item for collectors, a loving and lavishly presented memento of two incomparable Romanian pianists whose tragically premature deaths can never dim their timeless musical radiance. The story of their friendship is charted by Jerome Spycket in an essay accompanying this release, from their first meeting to a relationship darkened by events leading to the Second World War, a world in which Alfred Cortot’s anti-Semitism is confirmed (Haskil was Jewish, and hardly the first musician to find her career blocked by prejudice). Lipatti’s meteoric rise to fame gave Haskil both pain and joy as she languished unrecognised, and her unhappiness increased as she came under the spell of Lipatti’s charisma and ‘that serene face with its dark velvet eyes.’ Lipatti’s marriage to another pianist, Madeleine Dannhauer, left her bereft and disconsolate, and with veiled threats of suicide. This extraordinary saga was further compounded by what Spycket calls Lipatti’s ‘archangel innocence’ and finally by his death from leukaemia at the age of 33. As a further irony Haskil, herself a martyr to every form of illness and misfortune, only acquired her legendary status after Lipatti’s death.
Such is the revelatory background to previously unissued recordings of Liszt, Poulenc, Rachmaninov etc, where Haskil spins off one virtuoso challenge after another with a wit and brilliance that few could equal. Her rhetorical pauses in Liszt’s La leggierezza add spice to her dazzling musical flight, and more than compensate for the missing final bars. She is no less inspirational in the dark romantic storms of Brahms’s ‘Capriccio’, Op 76 No 5, and her Schumann Abegg Variations (always among her most extraordinary successes) fully bears out Lipatti’s insistence that it was perfection. How fascinating, too, to hear her reading through Beethoven’s Second Concerto, to eavesdrop on what were clearly the seeds of a future star performance. The Mozart Concerto (K271) represents a more formal occasion, one alive with that treasurable economy of expression where everything happens with minimum fuss or intervention.
Both pianists offer the same Bach Chorale (Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland) and Lipatti’s performance of Bartok’s Third Concerto with Paul Sacher is heard complete (it is also issued in better sound on EMl Classics, CDM5 66988-2). His own Sonatina for the Left Hand (the one once recorded by his pupil Bela Siki) is an alert and ingenious mix of neo-classicism and folk elements, and how touching to hear him speaking in French with characteristic modesty and forthrightness in three separate interviews.
This is a priceless issue which transcends its limited sound (the recordings, mostly made off-the-cuff, date from 1928-54) and leaves one to ponder the sad and loving ambivalence of Haskil’s response to Lipatti: ‘he is one of God’s chosen – but I’d like to thank God for having given me a little something too…