This is a frustrating album. Technically, Alexis Weissenberg
had the makings of an outstanding Chopin player. His dexterity
was unquestionable - trills, arpeggios, runs at any speed,
all posed him no problem. His reserves of power were immense:
not only was the man built like the proverbial Russian
bear, but his hands, at rest, easily covered a tenth or
more of the keyboard, as I noticed watching an
Evening
at Symphony telecast back in the 1970s.
The technical equipment was all there, but musicality was too frequently
in abeyance. Again and again in these two concertos, Weissenberg
plays as if oblivious to any expressive potential inherent
in the notes beyond their mere realization. He serves up
cascades of notes, each with pingy articulation, in the
filigree, loudly or softly as the score prescribes, but
without any sense of impulse, so they sound unmotivated.
He makes deep, imposing sounds at the climaxes - where
lighter-weight players strain - but the chords can be harsh
to the point of clangor. The soloist may have understood
the need for flexibility - his playing isn't robotic -
but his unflowing attempts at rubato actually impede the
sense of progress towards a musical destination. It's as
if the man had no poetry in his soul.
One might think that Weissenberg simply lacked empathy for Chopin,
but his EMI recordings of other concertos, from Beethoven
to Prokofiev, were similarly unintuitive and underfelt
- his Brahms D minor with Giulini was an especially ferocious
example. And the surprise is that, near the end of each
concerto's slow movement, Weissenberg suddenly catches
on. In the F minor's
Larghetto, he sets up the final
recapitulation magically at 7:30, although another of those
fitful rubatos early on almost dispels the fragile hush
before it's established. At an analogous spot in the E
minor's
Romance, he scales down from the peak at
7:33 sensitively, changes the color for the surprise harmonic
shift at 8:33, and weaves the decorative figurations around
the orchestra's melody with a welcome delicacy. Many more
passages in these performances would have benefited from
such treatment.
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, unobtrusively abetted by Salle Wagram ambience,
gives his soloist unexpectedly big-boned, full-bodied support
in the fast movements - a framework suitable to Weissenberg's
large-scaled pianism - and offers an effective, cushioned
atmosphere in those slow ones. Playing so forthrightly,
the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra sounds rather better
than the second-rate group it actually was. The woodwind
principals occasionally go wheezy, and the string basses
have their sclerotic moments, but the overall sonority
is solid. On the other hand, the bigger sound also unhelpfully
calls attention to the composer's thick, clunky orchestration
in the
tuttis of the F minor.
Mind you, these performances aren't actually
bad - the playing
is too accomplished, even abstractly beautiful, for that.
But they're mostly lacking in the very expressiveness and
color that, I suspect, most Chopin devotees will want -
the kind of thing that Ax (RCA), Perahia (Sony), and Zimerman
(DG), not to speak of Rubinstein (RCA), offered in spades.
Stephen Francis Vasta
see also review by Tim
Perry of the same performances on EMI
5009062 
Alexis Weissenberg
(piano) 
