Chopin Piano Concertos – Cherkassky

Old broadcast tapes never lie about the weather in the room, and these two — recorded eighteen months apart, worlds apart in temperament — tell you almost everything about how much a conductor’s ear can matter to a pianist who trusted almost nobody’s ear but his own.

Shura Cherkassky was, famously, an accident waiting to happen — or a revelation waiting to happen, depending on the night, sometimes depending on the minute. He came up through Josef Hofmann’s studio at Curtis, carried the whole nineteenth-century tradition of rubato and spontaneous recomposition into the late twentieth century like a man smuggling contraband, and he never really believed a reading should sound the same twice. That made him thrilling. It also made him a nightmare to follow with a baton, and conductors either understood this and floated with him or they gripped the wheel and hoped for the best.

Christopher Adey gripped the wheel.

The Glasgow tape of the E minor Concerto, from December 1981, has the BBC Scottish Symphony playing as though it has already read the weather report and packed an umbrella. The opening tutti is correct, metrically sound, entirely unseduced — you can practically hear the desks counting bars rather than listening to where the harmony wants to go. Cherkassky enters and does what Cherkassky does: stretches a phrase here, drops into a sudden hush there, voices an inner line that no other pianist on record thinks to bring out. But there’s no one catching him. The orchestra plays its part and waits for him to finish his. Even in the Romance the tone, for all its occasional silvery patches, feels bolted down rather than sung, and the finale — which should have some of that Chopinesque mazurka lilt under the bravura — just marches. It isn’t ruinous. It is, worse than ruinous, dutiful.

Then, extraordinarily, everything changes.

The F minor Concerto comes from a Proms night in August 1983 — the surviving documentation is coy about this, oddly, but the ambience, that particular cavernous Albert Hall bloom on the strings, gives it away before any announcer would. Richard Hickox is on the podium, and Hickox, whatever his reputation as a choral-and-British-music specialist, turns out to have been a natural Chopin accompanist: alert, pliant, unafraid to bend under the soloist’s weight rather than insist the soloist bend to his. The difference is audible from the first orchestral bars — there’s warmth in the phrasing, a sense that the BBC Symphony strings are leaning into the melodic line rather than merely stating it.

Cherkassky responds in kind. He is, comparatively, almost well-behaved — the exaggerations that mar some of his later recital Chopin are largely absent — and what comes through instead is tone. Real tone, the kind that made pianists of his generation, trained in a lineage running back through Hofmann to Anton Rubinstein, sound like they were singing through ten fingers rather than striking eighty-eight hammers. The Larghetto is the highlight of the whole disc: Hickox draws out the woodwind counter-melodies with unusual tact, letting the bassoon and clarinet answer the piano’s filigree instead of merely accompanying it, and Cherkassky’s decoration floats above without ever smothering the dialogue. The finale, that mazurka-tinged rondo that can sound merely cute in lesser hands, has real wit here, and the ensemble — ragged nowhere — holds together because Hickox is watching, not merely conducting.

Does either performance unseat the classic recordings — Rubinstein with Skrowaczewski, or for that matter Cherkassky’s own late-career studio account of the Second with the LSO? No. Nobody buys broadcast tapes expecting a demolition of the canon. What you get here is something more particular: a document of a great, wayward artist on an off night in Glasgow, and the same artist, less than two years later, finding a director willing to breathe with him. For Cherkassky devotees, the F minor alone justifies the disc. For everyone else, this is a footnote worth having, not a first choice — fascinating, uneven, and, in its best half hour, quietly moving.