Bach: Partita in B flat
Mozart: Sonata # 8 in a minor, K. 310
Schubert: Impromptus, Op 90, # 2 and 3
Chopin: 13 Waltzes
EMI Références CDH 5
65166 2
The phenomenon of a
musician dying young is, unfortunately, not so rare. All areas of music are poorer for
having lost the talents of major artists who would have made an even greater impact had
they lived out their maturity.
Although our thoughts
normally focus on rock and jazz musicians who flamed out early, classical music, too, has
shared in such losses. Indeed, it is likely that the fields of conducting, violin and
piano all would have been topped nowadays by artists who died decades ago. Ginette Neveu,
a phenomenal violinist, and Guido Cantelli, Toscanini's only protege, both were killed in
air crashes en route to concert engagements, victims of an urge to internationalize their
nascent careers.
Neveu and Cantelli, at
least, were spared knowledge of their fate. Dinu Lipatti was forced to confront his.
Lipatti was born in
Bucharest in 1917 to a family of musicians. He gave his first concert at the age of four
and was destined to become a great pianist. His teachers were the cream of classical
culture: pianist Alfred Cortot, conductor Charles Munch, composer Paul Dukas, and finally
Nadia Boulanger, arguably the most influential mentor of the century. He withdrew to his
native Roumania for private study during most of World War II, and then escaped to
Switzerland in 1943, where he taught and made his home.
After the War, just as he
had arrived in the pantheon of great performing artists, Lipatti was diagnosed with
leukemia. Producer Walter Legge urged him to record. His entire studio legacy barely fills
5 CDs (available separately at mid-price and packaged together as budget-priced EMI set
CZS 7 67162 2). Among the highlights are Chopin pieces and a justly famous reading of the
Grieg Piano Concerto with the Philharmonia conducted by Alecio Galliera.
The hallmark of Lipatti's
artistry, in Legge's phrase, was "softness through strength." Lipatti projected
enormous character, but without virtuoso display. Rather, his delicacy was direct and
under firm intellectual control. His artistry was modest and without ego: although he
loved Beethoven and died listening to records of the quartets, Lipatti felt himself
unworthy of performing Beethoven, and insisted that he would have to study the "Emperor"
Concerto for four years before he was willing to play it.
But time was the one thing
Lipatti did not have. By 1950, he was gravely ill. One of his very few recorded live
performances, a Schumann Piano Concerto, sympathetically accompanied by Ansermet
and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva on February 22, 1950 (on London CD 425
968), seems an ethereal wisp. In June he rallied from experimental cortisone treatments
enough to record his acclaimed studio version of the Chopin Waltzes and to give a
surprisingly strong Mozart Piano Concerto # 21 with Von Karajan at the Lucerne
Festival on August 23 (included on the EMI CDs). But then Lipatti's remission ended, his
strength evaporated and he was forced to confront his imminent end.
Despite the urgings of his
doctors, Lipatti insisted upon one last recital. The program would be a handful of his
favorite works and the setting would be the intimacy of the music festival to be held at
Besançon, France. As his wife Madeleine recalled, this was the only way Lipatti could
bear to take his leave of the world, since, "For him a concert was a pledge of his
love to Music."
Other mortally ill artists
have left us legacies of final concerts that may have had deep personal significance but
on purely musical terms really never should have happened. Perhaps the most pathetic was
Leonard Bernstein's appearance with the Boston Symphony in September 1990, a genuinely
dreadful performance without even a hint of his former expressive powers.
Lipatti was so weak he
could barely walk to the piano. But once he began playing, he became transformed. Despite
his youth, Lipatti poured into his performance a unique wisdom, a distillation of
everything he had lived for. He knew that this would have to stand as his final statement
as an artist and that there could be no afterthoughts or retakes. As fine as were his
studio readings, he achieved a genuine transcendence at Besançon.
Perhaps the greatest
tribute to Lipatti is that listeners can easily forget the poignant circumstances of this
concert. The playing is nearly note-perfect, each piece is brilliantly conceived, and
every phrase is alive with inflection, deeply expressive but under perfect emotional
control. The only hint of trouble, and a very subtle one at that, is that Lipatti played
only thirteen of Chopin's set of fourteen waltzes; realizing that he lacked the strength,
he did not even attempt the last one but instead ended the concert and his artistic life
with a short and soft Bach chorale, the final prayer of a consummate musician.
When first issued in 1957
on Angel B 3556, the dim sound in those hi-fi mania days led to respectful, rather than
ecstatic, reviews in comparison to Lipatti's sonically superior studio versions of all but
the Schubert. Unavailable for nearly three decades, the recital is now back on a single
mid-priced CD.
The CD sound is much
brighter and more immediate, but seems slightly inappropriate to the occasion; the
diaphanous sonics of the LPs were hauntingly compelling, as if to provide a suitably
discrete distance between the listener and the artist who, under these circumstances,
seemed entitled to a degree of privacy within which to confront and overcome his stifling
demons.
In an apparent effort to
avoid breaking the sustained mood, the CD chops off the applause that followed each piece
on the LPs, resulting in an abrupt release of each final note rather than the natural
decay of the concert hall. Also edited out is a poignant moment: before beginning the Bach
Partita, Lipatti "tested" the piano with an ascending scale, as pianists
often do before a recital, but his fingers collapsed on the fourth note. Rather than a
mere embarrassment, this flaw helps to explain the weakness of the attack of the opening
phrases of the Partita. It also throws the perfection of the remainder of the
recital into a breathtaking relief, and serves as a reminder of the magnitude of the will
power which Lipatti mustered to conquer his severe physical problems.
As with many other volumes
in their "Références" series, EMI includes beautifully poetic program notes by
André Tebouf, arguably the finest of all writers of this type of material. Inexplicably,
though, his French reverie is untranslated, and English readers have to plod through a far
more pedestrian essay.
But no matter -- this CD
documents not only one of the greatest recitals ever recorded but an overwhelmingly
emotional monument to the strength of the human spirit. In the words of Madeleine Lipatti,
it serves to recall "an extinguished star whose fire still gives us light."
Copyright 1995 by Peter
Gutmann
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