Born in Budapest in 1913 Andor Foldes settled in America
in 1940 after some successes there. As early as 1942 he recorded with
fellow Hungarian Josef Szigeti. Admirers will remember especially the
first Schubert Violin Sonata. After the War, before he became so identified
with the music of Bartók, he made a series of little known recordings
in Denmark for Tono and the majority have now been collected and issued
by APR.
Tono, like Decca, had rather noisy shellac and it’s
difficult to filter the noise without compromising or losing altogether
the higher frequencies. Total noise reduction would compress too much
and APR has instead skilfully retained some audible surface noise without
damaging the integrity of the recordings. These Tonos have been an undiscovered
discographic resource for a number of distinguished artists; at the
same time as Foldes made these recordings another émigré
Hungarian violinist and Nielsen’s son in law, Emil Telmanyi, was making
a prolific series of discs. It’s entirely right Foldes’ never since
reissued recordings should now gain a wider currency as it affords us
the opportunity to listen to him in his early maturity; he was thirty-seven
when the series began. He emerges from these discs as a cool and analytical
pianist. The Pathétique is technically adept, with clarity
of articulation in right hand runs and some attractive playing in the
outer movements. But it shares with the little Opp 78 and 79 Sonatas
a rather aloof personality. Whilst the Presto alla tedesca for
example is fluent it’s not witty and whereas the slow movement of the
same sonata is not over-scaled in terms of its place in the architecture
of the eight-minute work, it equally never really engages as it should.
His Schumann is of a piece with the general profile
of his playing. The Abegg Variations are flecked with some filigree
treble at their conclusion but Papillons has a limited range
of dynamics and a lack of intimacy and fantasy. His rhythm at the start
is much more regular than, say, Cortot’s, whose rhythmically disruptive
playing immediately conjures up the fantastic. Foldes, by comparison,
is a lot more brusque and cosmopolitan, lacking the Frenchman’s insinuating
cragginess and spontaneity. Foldes can’t help but seem metronomic and
rather prosaic in comparison. His Brahms is also troubling. Facelessness
bedevils the Intermezzo whilst the Rhapsody is analytical, rather mechanical,
contrastive sections uninvolving and an almost total lack of legato.
His coolness vitiates Chopin’s A Flat Waltz and an unrelieved mezzo
forte runs throughout the Polonaise, shorn of dynamic contrasts
and quite clearly not the fault of Tono’s engineers. Others will doubtless
hold more positive views of Foldes’ playing here; his analytical clarity
will appeal to collectors of mid-century Beethovenian performance practice.
He is not a pianist who appeals to me but the important point is that
these long unavailable recordings are once more open to scrutiny and
investigation.
Jonathan Woolf
Andor Foldes, piano