Walter Gieseking pf

APR

Gieseking’s Debussy was long considered supreme. For Abram Chasins in Speaking of Pianists, Gieseking’s performances were of a ‘disembodied aural beauty, the intoxication of sensuous perfume, the blaze of sunlight, the shimmer of moonlight on water.’

Gieseking was indeed a ‘sorcerer.’ Hear him in ‘Voiles,’ ‘Les sons et les parfums’ or ‘Des pas sur la neige’ and you sense how everything is accomplished by tonal finesse rather than heavy underlining of self-conscious significance. Yet in contrast to such calibre you also note frequent approximation rather than precision, a nonchalant blurring of detail and washes of sound (however iridescent) rather than anything more acute.

Rushed fences and telescoped phrases are not always compensated by Gieseking’s most celebrated attributes. Why the hurry in the Menuet from Suite bergamasque, as well as throughout Estampes, L’isle joyeuse and ‘Poisson d’or’? Were the exigencies of early recording techniques responsible for a frequent sense of music being chivvied out of focus? Gieseking’s performances of these works have more time to breathe in his later LPs.

So although APR’s issue is historically valuable, we must still turn to Gieseking’s Debussy box set for EMI (now Warner) to hear him at his inimitable best. Here he is truly beyond compare.