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