As the tiny, dapper Shura Cherkassky was wont to say, in explanation of his growing popularity as he went on performing into his 80s: ‘People come to my concerts because I’m old and still around, and everyone else is dead.’

Of course, they came for a bit more than that. Cherkassky’s act was always superstitiously controlled: he had to step on stage with his right foot first (‘or things will go badly’), and he took his bows with comically dainty precision. When he started a piece it would inevitably be different from the previous time he’d played it. Each performance was an impromptu act of creation, whose colouring and texture not even he would know in advance.

Born in Odessa and whisked off to America by his Jewish parents to escape the Russian Revolution, Cherkassky was a child prodigy who had difficulty in making the transition to adult success. But once in the pianistic pantheon, he never looked back; the audiences for these marathon recitals in California responded with outright adoration. Rachmaninov had spotted him and wanted to teach him, but that honour fell to Josef Hofmann, under whose tutelage he developed his uniquely golden touch.

Some pieces occur twice here, allowing us to see how radically his interpretations could change. Hofmann’s Kaleidoscop is a case in point: in 1982 it emerged as a crazy blizzard of notes guaranteed to defy all normal attempts at analysis, but five years later it had developed limbs and a spine. Cherkassky hadn’t so much tamed it as reconceived it, and the versions are equally valid.

And he loved to surprise. Lightning strikes continually in the calm waters of Franck’s Prelude, chorale et fugue; Pierrot creeps about like a ghost in Schumann’s Carnaval, and Coquette prances suggestively. Liszt wasn’t his thing, but Rachmaninov released the Russian in him, and Chopin the Pole. His account of Chopin’s F minor Fantaisie reflects his ability to generate small surprises by stressing a phrase or presenting a bar in an unexpected colour. His treatment of Chopin’s Nocturne Op 55 No 1 is marvellously subtle, starting demure and dainty, then darkening its palette before concluding under a starlit sky, the whole thing an exquisite tone poem.

If I had to choose just one piece from this cornucopia, it would be Cherkassky’s account of Rachmaninov’s Corelli Variations, a thrilling emotional switchback in which martial menace and mellow sweetness take it in turns to hold the stage.

This review originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano