We're told that the 37-year-old Zurich-born Werner Bartschi is an artistic personality not conforming ''to the usual standards of the musical world...'' etc. etc. This, and a photo evoking a bald-topped, shaggy side-haired and bearded contemporary of Brahms, made my heart sink in anticipation of another shedder of what goes by the name of 'new light'. So what a relief to say that you could scarcely hope to hear less quirky or exhibitionist Chopin playing than this, not least by reason of its controlled rubato.
In his own notes on the music, Bartschi reminds us that Chopin was a favourite guest of the wealthy art-lovers who frequently gave music parties in their Parisian homes. He himself never seems to forget this. While there is no lack of strength or impulse in his readings at moments of climax (and only the con fuoco coda of the G minor Ballade momentarily taxes his technique), always he creates an impression of playing to an intimate circle of initiates rather than emotionally inflating the music for projection to countless strangers in a vast hall. And because of his intuitive understanding of where every phrase is going, and why, as well of the overall shape of each piece, nearly always the message comes across. I particularly enjoyed the aerial lightness and grace, and still more the melodic flow beneath the decorative finger flights of the E major Scherzo. The G minor Ballade is unfolded with a continuity betokening acute awareness of its own unbroken organic growth, and both Nocturnes are most sensitively shaded (not least in textural subtleties) and shaped.
My disappointments, such as they were, came in the B minor Sonata. In the first movement Bartschi's fluent fingers don't always allow certain phrases enough time to breathe, or flower, with some loss of majesty in the first subject, and certainly a wholly unmagical return of the second subject in the development. The opening of the Largo also struck me as marginally too fast, though in this movement he makes amends in a very ripe central section—with unusually significant detail in the right-hand figuration. The finale is certainly cumulatively exciting, though I don't approve of his sudden switch to a faster tempo en route. In this work he is of course up against formidable competition—not least from the imperious Pollini (DG) and the more personally poetic Ashkenazy on Decca (my own desert-island choice), who get recordings at once richer and clearer than his. In his resonant venue I think Bartschi himself sometimes over-pedals.'