Post on 10-Nov-2021
GRIEG • LISZT • MOZART Piano Sonatas in Concert, 1971
SHURA CHERKASSKY piano
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A recital by the great Russian-American pianist Shura
Cherkassky (1911-1995) was always an occasion.
Whenever and wherever he appeared there was always
a sense of excitement and expectation that what was to
follow would be an unknown quantity. Of course,
Cherkassky was always secure in his conception of a work,
but he allowed his interpretation to reflect the way he
felt at the moment he was playing. Therefore, although
his style and sound were instantly recognisable, he never
played the same piece the same way twice. This element
of the concert-going experience has all but disappeared
today with predictability and seriousness resulting in
dwindling audiences. That is not to say that Cherkassky
was not a serious artist, but he was from a generation of
musicians who did not preach to the audience, who knew
that for the public to return he had to give them
something compelling. Cherkassky certainly gave many
things to his audience, but the paramount elements were
enjoyment and musical satisfaction. He also engendered
a curiosity in his audiences to hear his own interpretation
and conception of a well known work.
The main part of the recital presented here consists of
three piano sonatas – by Mozart, Liszt and Grieg.
Cherkassky rarely played the music of Mozart, possibly
none of the piano concertos, with only the Rondo alla
Turca as an encore and Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy being
regular items on his programmes. However, at the end
of his career he was playing the Piano Sonata in A
major, K331, and, like Horowitz in old age, the Piano
Sonata in B flat, K333. That is not to say that Cherkassky
entirely avoided Mozart earlier in his career. For a
Salzburg Festival recital in 1961 he performed another
sonata from 1783, the C major, K330. The performance
heard here is the only known recording of Cherkassky
in the Piano Sonata in A minor, K310. It is a typically
lyrical reading particularly in the first movement
opening, which is often played as an angry march.
Standing at the vanguard of the great nineteenth-
century sonatas, Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor was a
staple of Cherkassky’s repertoire and he recorded it for
HMV in the late 1950s and Nimbus in 1985. He was also
playing it in his last season during 1994/1995. It is well
known that due to his impulsive style, Cherkassky often
preferred to record in long takes with as little editing as
possible, and the recordings that exist of him in live
performance have an added dimension. The particular
performance presented here of the Liszt Sonata is a
case in point because, on this occasion, Cherkassky was
at the peak of his form, delivering a blistering account
to surpass all his other recordings. He plays with an
overwhelmingly ferocious drama, glorious, sonorous
tone, and an extraordinarily accurate technique.
Shura Cherkassky – in Concert, 1971
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The early Piano Sonata in E minor by Grieg is not a work
to have found a place in the regular repertoire of
pianists, although Glenn Gould recorded it in the same
year as this concert was recorded. Aldo Ciccolini, that
extraordinary pianist with an omnivorous repertoire,
recorded it in 1964 and back in the days of acoustical
recording, when the work was more likely to have been
played by amateurs, Australian pianist Una Bourne
recorded it for HMV. Even before this, at the dawn of
recording in May 1903, the composer himself recorded
abridged versions of two movements of the work in
Paris. Cherkassky was playing the work regularly during
the mid-1980s and his conception of the work is not as
a string of four miniatures, but as a major piano sonata
of the repertoire – in other words, he takes the work
seriously and not as ‘light’ or ‘drawing room’ music.
Mana-Zucca (1885-1981), an American child prodigy who
had studied piano with Busoni and Godowsky, was better
known as a composer, producing over a thousand works
in many different genres. She was a friend of Cherkassky
and he played a number of her piano works throughout
his career, often as encores. As a young teenager in 1925
he recorded Prelude but in the mid-1980s was
programming three of his favourite works – Prelude,
Zouaves Drill and Fugato Humoreske on ‘Dixie’. Often
quirky, the music obviously appealed to Cherkassky’s
sense of humour (as did Morton Gould’s Boogie-Woogie
Etude, another favourite encore). The work heard here is
one he played rarely, her Burlesque, Op. 261.
Professor of Piano at the Moscow Conservatory, the
great pianist Paul (Pavel) Pabst (1854-1897) was a close
friend of Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein, Rachmaninov
and Tchaikovsky, the latter referring to him as ‘a pianist
of divine elegance’ and ‘a pianist from God’. Pabst has
been unfairly overshadowed by his illustrious
contemporaries; his arrangements and paraphrases of
operas of the day were highly successful while as a
pianist, he was in the same league as Liszt and Anton
Rubinstein. A few years ago Marston Records issued
some primitive cylinder recordings of Pabst made in
Russia in the 1890s and these show a freedom of style,
an enjoyment in performing and sharing music that is
revelatory. These are elements of performance that
Cherkassky presented at his concerts and are evident in
his playing of Pabst’s Concert Paraphrase on Themes
from ‘Eugene Onegin’ by P. Tchaikovsky, Op. 81.
Two favourite Cherkassky encores close the programme
– the Scriabin Prelude is a lesson in tone production
and how to make the piano sing, while the Stravinsky
Russian Dance brings the recital to a rousing end.
Although the tape of this recital, which comes from
Cherkassky’s own private collection housed at the
British Library, is well documented with date, performer
and works listed, the location is not. Extensive research
at many libraries, agents and newspapers has not
revealed the location. We know from the Ibbs & Tillet
archive that Cherkassky performed in Pitlochry in
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Scotland on 27 June 1971 and that he was scheduled to
appear in Guildford on 22 May 1971, but for some
reason he did not, and Moura Lympany substituted,
playing the advertised work of Brahms’ Piano Concerto
No. 1, albeit for a lesser fee. Later in the year he was in
Australia and he may have also been in South Africa. It
is possible he was in Europe or America during June,
but concrete evidence has so far not been forthcoming.
The tape itself, now more than forty years old, has
some imperfections which have been addressed, and it
would seem that the recording was made with a
microphone standing on the stage, rather than
suspended above it, hence Cherkassky’s impetuous
stamping of the pedal in places is audible. However, it
is the quality of the performance that is important, and
here we are privileged to hear one of the twentieth
century’s finest pianists at the height of his powers.
© 2013 Jonathan Summers
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Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791) Piano Sonata No. 8 in A minor, K310 19:08
1 I Allegro maestoso 6:212 II Andante cantabile con espressione 9:223 III Presto 3:25
Franz LISZT (1811-1886) Piano Sonata in B minor, S178 24:20
4 I Lento assai – Allegro energico 9:285 II Andante sostenuto 5:316 III Allegro energico – Andante sostenuto
– Lento assai 9:21
Edvard GRIEG (1843-1907) Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 7 17:16
7 I Allegro moderato 4:208 II Andante molto 3:429 III Alla menuetto, ma poco più lento 2:500 IV Finale: Molto allegro 6:24
MANA-ZUCCA (1885-1981) ! Burleske, Op. 261 3:41
Paul (Pavel) PABST (1854-1897) @ Concert Paraphrase on Themes from
‘Eugene Onegin’ by P. Tchaikovsky, Op. 81 11:43
Alexander Nikolayevich SCRIABIN (1872-1915) # Etude in C sharp minor, Op. 1, No. 2 3:18
Igor STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) $ Russian Dance from ‘Petrushka’ 2:53
Recorded 2 June 1971Produced by FHRRemastered & Edited at K&A Productions Ltd. by Debs Spanton in 2012Cover photo: ‘No. 1’ (Kagoshima, Japan)taken by Nolan Webb in 2007
Graphic design & layout: David MurphyTypesetting: Nick Staines
Publishers: Congress Music Publishers (track 11);Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. (track 14)
Special thanks to Jonathan Summers.Thanks also to Peter Bromley, Christa Phelps and the Cherkassky Estate, Tom Ruane (British Library), Nick Staines, Debs Spanton & Nolan Webb.
Recordings used by kind permission of the British Library
� 2013 � 2013. The copyright in these remasteredrecordings is owned by First Hand Records Ltd.
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Photo taken by Frederick Bass in c.1975 © Tully Potter Collection