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I'd have to venture a guess that the golden age of piano performance was around the 1920s. Not the piano or pianism - the piano is as much the very instrument 19th century and all its aspirations as the electric guitar is of the 20th. The music that truly defines the instrument - Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, (and Alkan, shhhh) was all written in one generation around the 1830s and 40s.
But after that music was written, it took an entire lifetime to figure out the best way to perform it. Before the generation of Hofmann, Rachmaninov, Friedman, Cortot, Schnabel, Gieseking, Landowska, Hess, Godowsky, Backhaus, Horszowski, Lhevinne, Gabrillowitsch, Levitzki, Moisewitsch, and early Rubinstein and Kempff, the piano was such a different instrument. As many people played the piano in the 19th century as played the guitar during the last sixty years. And since the piano was such a direct experience, nobody expected pianists to get every note right any more than they expected rock or even jazz singers to sing with good vocal production. What mattered was individuality, personality, attitude, charisma. At its worst, like rock at its worst, it must have been a purely cosmetic experience, much more about attitude and lifestyle than music: long hair, choreographed movements to mimic passion, rewarding blatant effects over creativity. But surely there were truly great nineteenth century pianists, and if anything, if you listen to the extreme passion of Eugen d'Albert and Frederic Lamond in Beethoven, I have to imagine the late 19th century Beethoven performance you got from Liszt, Rubinstein, Bulow, Tausig, d'Albert in his prime, etc. was even better than whomever else is in your personal pantheon (for Beethoven: Schnabel, Gulda, Richter, Kovacevich, Hess, and Gieseking - my Beethoven needs animal passion).
But there was, of course, a sweet spot, a golden generation, born to 19th century culture and all the idiomatic secrets of its culture and style, but sufficiently distanced from the sloppy rock-idol pianism of Paderewski to understand its demerits. The ego of former perfomers was gone, with emphasis placed squarely on the composer, but after them began a slow but steady fetishization of technical accuracy and score fidelity.
There is no composer who so belongs to the values we commonly think of as the 19th century's exclusive property as Chopin. He is entirely great, but do not go to Chopin expecting insights greater than a motion capture those primary emotions of the heart with 100% accuracy. His music, even at its most dramatic, is the values of the 19th century bourgeois personified. His evocations of war, like in the Heroic and Military Polonaises, look forward to battle with overwhelming excitement. His evocations of death, as in the famous funeral march, are the grandeur of state death, not the tragedies of ordinary people. Those trying to locate a greater eschatology in Chopin will only come up with air.
Even the greatest pianists who truly belong to the 20th century don't really know what to do with him - Richter and Gilels, with the tragedies of their era baked into their playing, can only offer Chopin distended, Arrau and Barenboim, with their Mann-and-Heidegger like metaphysical speculations, bring Chopin to a loftiness for which Chopin has no use, Pollini and Ashkenazy, with their scientific accuracy and literalism, simultaneously impress and make you wonder why you're listening. Like the Beatles, Chopin is truly great, but he is folk music for the bourgeois, and he requires pianists who can play as spontaneously as a folk musician - neither literally what's on the page nor an imposed concept, simply using one's personality to play the music simply, and letting it speak.
No one played Chopin better than the Poles of exactly a hundred years ago: Hofmann, Rubinstein, Horszowski, and Friedman.
Hofmann has been relegated to the background of piano history, but Friedman has been virtually forgotten by all but piano nuts. He is not quite as awe-inspiring as Hofmann (nobody is nor ever could be). He is slightly more spontaneous and romantic, but next to Hofmann, I doubt there's ever been a better Chopin player - including Rubinstein. It's not just the nimbleness of the finger work, or the spontaneity of the rhythms and the dynamic extremes, it's the general esprit and elan, which if anything, is much warmer than Hofmann, who seems more god than man. It is not just naturalness and idiom, and not just technique and intelligence, it is the ability to let Chopin be Chopin and communicate from the heart to the heart.
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