In 1949 the English
poet Basil Bunting - a music critic
in his youth, incidentally - wrote a
poem ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos’,
in which he recognised the centrality,
the inescapability of Ezra Pound’s achievement
in that poem. Bunting’s poem contains
the following lines:-
These are the Alps. What is there
to say about them?
…
There they are, you will have
to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
Much the same can –
should - surely be said about Cortot’s
recordings of Chopin. No other pianist
has done so much to shape the modern
performance of Chopin. That isn’t, of
course, to say that all his successors
have played Chopin in quite the way
that Cortot did; but it is to assert
that just as you couldn’t become a major
twentieth century poet in ignorance
of Pound’s achievement and what he had
to teach, so too no pianist could become
a major interpreter of Chopin without
taking account of Cortot.
This is the first of
five Naxos CDs given over to Cortot’s
78-rpm era recordings of Chopin. The
series will include at least one version
of all the Chopin solo works recorded
by Cortot and the collection is designed
to place particular emphasis on recordings
which have been reissued only infrequently,
or not at all. Thus we get the 1926
recording of the Op. 28 preludes, rather
than the better-known version of 1933,
and the 1931 recording of the Op. 43
Tarantelle is certainly not over-familiar.
Everywhere on the CD
there is wonderful, intelligent, imaginative
piano-playing to be heard. There’s the
tragic scope and intensity of Cortot’s
interpretation of the A flat major prelude
(no.17); there’s the elegant, intimate,
fugitive feelings of the A major prelude
(no.7), only sixteen measures long but
here invested with a substance far greater
than any consideration of mere length.
The A minor prelude (no.2) has a painful
bleakness which stays in the mind long
after hearing it; the E major prelude
(no.9) is played with remarkable vision
and control. This first was not perhaps
the finest of Cortot’s four recordings
of Op. 28, but it has distinctive qualities
of its own. The first of the impromptus
has a delightful playfulness; the G
flat major impromptu (no.3) is characterised
in a fashion which is, paradoxically,
both graceful and somewhat disturbing,
emotionally speaking. The Berceuse is
ravishingly gentle and the Tarantelle
builds up to an almost trance-like momentum,
as if danced under a blazing southern
Italian sun.
Cortot’s Chopin has
a remarkable sense of dialogue between
the two hands; it balances weight of
emotion against elegance of surface;
it pays attention both to atmosphere
and to structure. Above all, it has
a sense of searching, a commitment to
the discovery of the depths of both
the music and the self. The performances
feel almost like improvisations; certainly
there is nothing about them of the over-prepared
routine. It is as if each performance
is a new search – a sense confirmed
if one compares the two performances
of the D flat major prelude (no.15),
one from 1926, one from 1950, which
are both included on this CD. The mistakes,
the lapses of memory, for which Cortot
was famous, are an inevitable consequence
of this approach. There’s evidence of
them here, but I don’t find that they
are more than relatively minor blemishes.
The sound quality is
surprisingly good, and given the compelling
nature of the music making one’s ears
soon adjust to such surface noise as
there inevitably is.
This is a programme
made up, largely, of miniatures. But
there is something towering about them,
as performed by Cortot. Bunting ends
the poem to which I referred earlier,
by observing:-
There they are, you will have to
go a long way round
if you want to avoid them …
… There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for
them to crumble!
Cortot’s Chopin performances
will certainly endure and it would,
indeed, be foolish to try to ‘avoid’
them.
See also reviews
by Jonathan
Woolf and Dominy
Clements .
Glyn Pursglove
Alfred Cortot (piano) 
