Chopin Preludes

 So what are people's favorite Chopin complete prelude recordings?

This is a set that fascinates me, addicts me, far more than it inspires love. Being almost the exact length of an LP record, it reminds me greatly of a perfect album of popular music, like The Beatle's Rubber Soul, or The Immortal Otis Redding. If anything, I'm more certain of the art in The Beatles, a group in which, as to call the Pope Catholic, there is considerable artistic value.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with pop music, and surely great pop music has artistic value. It's just that like so much popular music, the Preludes have an almost complete lack of irony and emotional ambiguity; but that direct emotional impact are something we all sometimes need. The ambiguity in the Chopin Preludes comes from the juxtaposition of such different expressions in the same set of pieces.

Like popular music, the value, the art rather than entertainment, comes from the skill and humanity of the performer. Some performers, great performers, don't have it. There are great pianists I simply have to shut off before the end, because I find their expression of these pieces irritating, insipid, completely bereft of substantial emotional meaning: even pianists as great and deep as Arrau and Schiff have little of value to contribute to these pieces: Arrau being simply pretentious in his Arrau way, while Schiff is atypically unnuanced and bland.

My single favorite is a very hard to find live recital recording from 1973 by Mieczyslaw Horszowski, then in his early eighties. He takes a full 40 minutes of complete emotional vulnerability. Tatyana Nikolayevna is similarly wonderful for the same reason.

Of the early recordings, I especially love Raoul Koczalski, who was the pupil of Chopin's closest pupil, and perhaps got his interpretation from the horse's mouth. He plays alternate versions, does rubatos nobody else does yet also plays parts straight-no-chaser like the E-minor prelude which is a good 50% faster than nearly everybody except Andras Schiff's extremely mediocre video recording.

What Koczalski represents, and he's hardly the most extreme example, is the old Chopin tradition. What Artur Rubinstein called the 'swan-dive' approach. Rubinstein is the point at which we arrive at the second half of Chopin interpretation, after which Chopin style is no longer inherited like mother's milk. Pianists of Rubinstein's generation grew up with Chopin in their ears, not only from their lessons but as listeners: hearing their mothers practice these works every day. Rubinstein was a towering Chopin player, but whether he was the cause or the bellweather of the change, his impact on Chopin performance was calamitous. After Rubinstein's massively distributed recordings comes a terrible bifurcation, from which the tradition is lost, and everyone is either as modern as a corporate office building or romantic in a way that defeats the purpose of romanticism.

What the great Chopinists of Rubinstein's generation did was not pointlessly mannered, like the great Italian tenors singing Verdi, every liberty was taken for the purpose of elucidating something important in the music: a rubato to emphasize a half-cadence followed by an entirely new color pallete for the new key, a hand-break to emphasize the notes of a particularly dissonant chord, special accents to emphasize an important counter-melody that would otherwise be lost in the texture. As one former friend used to say to me, they 'tell a story' with the music.

After Rubinstein, all that was lost. A number of great romantics tried to get it back: Arrau, Richter, Pires, Pogorelich, (just speaking of the Preludes here), and yet, contra some famous critics, they didn't know how, and it all just sounds distracting from the music. Certain stars with transcendent gifts like Argerich and Sokolov,were able to recapture the greatness of the Preludes on their own terms, but in manners that inevitably emphasized their interpretations more than the music itself. On the other hand you have those modernist pianists who, as Richter said, 'cast Chopin in bronze' like Pollini and Ashkenazy, Gulda, and sadly, Schiff (or Michelangeli who casts Chopin in broken glass). What is this music under them? Is it great music or just a mass-plaster rendering of it? Meanwhile, many of the greatest musician/pianists who might have intuited the style clearly thought Chopin vulgar and did not make Chopin a priority in their repertoires: Firkusny, Kraus, Brendel, Lupu, etc... Even Lipatti when he plays Chopin, who has a glorious feeling for the rhythmic lilt of his waltzes and the colors needed to illustrate his harmonies, operates at base from a modern sonority of cast-iron that gets in the way of Chopin's beauty (ducks from oncoming fire...). So not even the alleged greatest lost pianist of history can recapture the glories of the tradition during the years the grand tradition was fading.

But then we have those early pianists of the grand tradition: Hofmann, Friedman, Koczalski, Moiseiwitsch, Novaes, Horszowski, Cherkassky (a bit later but he was a Hofmann pupil), Long, Meyer, who studied with Polish and French piano artists immersed in the Chopin tradition, studying with those who knew Chopin or the pupils of those who knew, and passed the secrets on (we'll get into my heretical thoughts on Cortot another day). Thank god, we have five of them doing the complete prelude set, and each of them are extraordinary in different ways.

Is the tradition permanently lost? Well,,, not quite. We still have Krystian Zimerman. You don't have to be Polish to play Chopin properly, but it can't hurt. Doubtless there were still teachers obscurely crawling around Poland who knew 'how to make the music go.' His ballades are positively visionary, like Furtwangler's Wagner, Bernstein's Mahler, Corelli's Verdi. Those rambling near-improvisations are not my favorite pieces, except when played by an ecstatic like Zimerman or Hofmann, at which point you hear the improvisatory recitative spirit Chopin surely intended, and exactly what's missing in most performances. Then there was the curious case of Ivan Moravec, of whose much praised nocturnes I have contrarian thoughts. Yet his preludes, my god, they are playing of such fragile vulnerability and tenderness. You feel embarrassed, as though you're intruding on a stranger's moment too intimate to let you to see (what might Lupu have done with these pieces?). His much touted sound is a little too percussive for Chopin, yet what matters that in the face of those incredible pianissimos which fade away to nothing? Perhaps it's all a little too much. The great Chopinists of yesteryear put far more fun into the works, but this is surely the hurt that Chopin meant to express. Then there's the case of the pianist who is quickly becoming my favorite modern Chopinist: the great and still underrated Tamas Vasary, now past 90. Like Moravec, Vasary struggles with the nocturnes, but the etudes reach near transcendence. Vasary is every bit as modern and non-interventionist as Pollini and Ashkenazy, but what in their hands is mechanical and soulless becomes balanced and classical, a luminosity that is almost Mozartian. The rubato is quite subtle, and there isn't enough phrasing, but every note sings. No line dominates the others and no banging breaks the spell. In Vasary's hands, Chopin achieves both dignity and irony. Truly, he is one of the great musician-pianists. In Vasary's hands Chopin has the humanity of Mozart and Schubert. I wonder if there is any pianist who better convinces me that Chopin deserves his reputation entire. I still haven't heard new Chopinists of great regard like Rafal Blechatz and Jan Lisiecki.

Here, in bad sound (though it gets better as it goes along), is Horszowski doing the Raindrop, the greatest prelude of all at the Vatican in 1940! A born Jew playing at the Vatican amid the Shoah? It's unheard of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUlrlysEKQk

What do people recommend?

Horszowski's complete Preludes has disappeared from youtube.

In its place may I first suggest Shura Cherkassky? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1F1oo7e85E

Then Raoul Koczalski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhfmiuVSnDw

Then Ivan Moravec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUlrlysEKQk

Then Benno Moiseiwitsch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gborhb6z3To

Then Artur Rubinstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4TspTbU7i4

Then Tatiana Nikolayeva: Chopin - 24 Préludes - Tatiana Nikolayeva (1982) - YouTube

Then Guiomar Novaes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyO9sUsZcwc

As Horszowski played until he was 100, here is his Raindrop Prelude in a much more modern performance: Chopin: Prelude Op. 28, No. 15 in D flat major

...maybe I do love this music....