Also this issue:

The Big Con
Why Philadelphia bands play the CMJ festival.
-Patrick Rapa

Tropical Impressions
Caetono Veloso tells the truth.
-A.D. Amorosi

Back to Basics
Which in The Divine Comedy's case means less rock, more baroque.
-Sam Adams

Flute Awakening
-Peter Burwasser

Right On Time
-Sam Adams

Catherine Irwin
-Sam Adams

Kim Richey
-Sam Adams

Jack Johnson
-Chris Parker

November 7-13, 2002

music

suitespot

by Peter Burwasser on Classical

When pianist Murray Perahia first arrived on the scene in 1972, his calling card was the quietly mysterious, densely written music of Schumann, and shortly thereafter, Mozart. He was immediately hailed as a poet of the piano, one who eschewed pyrotechnics and self-aggrandizement, a pure artist in the mold of his great teacher Mieczyslaw Horszowski. Then, about a decade later, Perahia began visiting with, and taking unorthodox lessons from none other than Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great keyboard wizards in history. This teacher-student match-up was tantalizing -- and just a bit weird, as Horowitz was as extroverted as Horszowski was penetrating. His recordings in the years after the Horowitz encounters displayed a new style: louder, harsher and more showy. Liszt and Rachmaninoff entered his repertoire.

Perahia's career continued apace, when a hand injury, precipitated by a paper cut of all things, delayed his public schedule. After a hiatus of a couple of seasons, Perahia returned to the stage and the recording studio last year with smart and beautiful Bach playing, almost as a paean to his earliest triumphs. His newest recording is of the mighty Chopin études, one of the Everests of the solo piano repertoire, and this astonishing performance seems to be a culmination of all of the myriad influences on his artistry, equal measures fire and poetry.

With Chopin: Études (Sony Classical), Perahia instantly joins the ranks of the finest recorded interpreters of these 24 individual pieces, including Maurizio Pollini, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Earl Wild and Alfred Cortot. It is Cortot, who made the first complete recording of the études in 1933, whom Perahia most resembles. In technical terms, Cortot is much rougher than Perahia, but there is a bravura and spontaneity in both renditions that is astounding. Other pianists, notably Pollini, conquer the score with brilliant virtuosity, but Perahia goes a step further and connects deeply to the music. Ashkenazy, especially in his earliest recording made while he was still in Russia, and the ever-remarkable Earl Wild, both find great beauty and color in the music, but at times at the expense of the febrile passion that Perahia delivers with startling power.

Perahia's Chopin études is a superb recording, but it is also a fascinating snapshot of the latest phase of an unusual and inspired career. Piano fanciers around the world look forward to where the next turn of this intrepid artist's journey takes him, and we the listeners along with him.