Askenase in East Germany – MeloClassic Piano Concerts

There is a particular kind of pianism that has all but vanished from the concert stage, and Stefan Askenase — obscure now to most listeners under sixty — was one of its last custodians. Not a barnstormer. Not a poet of excess. A musician who trusted the score to do most of the talking and simply refused to get in its way.

That refusal is audible from the first bars of these East German broadcasts, taped when Askenase was already past seventy and, by most professional calculations, should have been thinking about retirement rather than a punishing itinerary of provincial concert halls behind the Iron Curtain. He never did retire, as it happens — he died on tour, in 1985, forty cities into a schedule that would exhaust a pianist half his age. There is something fitting about that. This was a man who regarded the concert platform as home rather than ordeal.

The Vienna pedigree matters here, and it is worth pausing on it, because it explains so much of what you hear. Askenase studied with Emil von Sauer, himself a Liszt pupil, and further back the lineage runs through his own mother, who had studied with Karol Mikuli — Chopin’s assistant at the end of the composer’s life, the man who prepared the first “complete” edition of the works. That is about as close to the source as a twentieth-century pianist could plausibly claim to be, three degrees of separation from Chopin’s own hands at the keyboard. You hear it in the Chopin playing on this set: no swagger, no interpretive editorializing, just an unforced singing line and a rubato so natural it barely announces itself as rubato at all — it simply breathes with the phrase, the way an old singer breathes, taking the time it needs and not a beat more.

The Mozart is the real discovery here, though, at least for me. Askenase’s account of the Piano Sonata in B-flat major, K. 333 has a poise that few pianists manage without tipping into either primness or sentimentality — he finds the wit in the finale’s cadenza without underlining it, without winking at the audience, and the effect, on a second and third hearing, is oddly moving. I found myself replaying that passage more than once just to hear how quietly he lets the joke land. This is not demonstrative playing. It will strike listeners weaned on Argerich or Pogorelich as almost withholding. But put Askenase beside contemporaries like Edith Farnadi or Julian von Károlyi — both of whom turn up elsewhere in this same Meloclassic archive series — and you notice how much more Askenase trusts silence, trusts the natural decay of the piano’s tone, rather than pushing dynamics for effect.

The recorded sound, as one expects from broadcast tape of this vintage, is serviceable rather than radiant — a bit of room ambience, occasional audience rustle, the characteristic thinness East German radio engineers of the period seemed unable to avoid. It does not flatter the piano’s bass register. But it does not obscure the pianism either, and that, in the end, is the only thing that matters on a release like this.

What’s slightly maddening, from a historical standpoint, is how conservative these particular programs are. Askenase before the war had been an advocate for new music — Szymanowski, Milhaud, Karol Rathaus, the Lemberg-born Ignace Lilien, even Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata, which he introduced to London audiences to a critical shrug so magnificently dismissive it deserves quotation: once the novelty had worn off, apparently, “there is little else left.” One wishes some trace of that adventurousness had survived into these later years. Instead we get Mozart, Chopin, a Scarlatti encore, a Mendelssohn scherzo he’d already committed to disc for DG in the fifties. Comfortable repertoire, played by a man for whom comfort was clearly never the point — the security was in service of something else, an unforced intimacy with the music that younger, flashier pianists often mistake for the absence of ideas.

It isn’t the absence of ideas. It’s the presence of a player who no longer needed to prove he had any.

Recommended, then, with the usual caveats about broadcast sonics — and recommended especially to pianists in training, who could learn more from twenty minutes of this restraint than from any number of more glamorous recordings.