Here are Chopin’s complete works for cello and piano complemented by an intriguing garland of encores. Performed with a relish inseparable from youth, impressively balanced and recorded, this is a notable offering, particularly at Naxos’s super-bargain price. Clearly, Kliegel and Glemser have few reservations concerning the sonata’s surprisingly Germanic overtones. Recognizably Chopin in virtually every bar (and never more so than in the Scherzo’s central and soaring L’istesso tempo) there remains an oddly Schumannesque bias, particularly in the finale’s tortuous argument – an irony when you consider that Chopin had so little time for his adoring colleague. Yet this awkward and courageous reaching out towards a terser form of expression is resolved by both artists with great vitality and, throughout, they create an infectious sense of a live rather than studio performance.
Kliegel and Glemser are no less uninhibited in Chopin’s earlier show-pieces, written at a time when the composer had a passing passion for grand opera and for what he himself dismissed as “glittering trifles”. In the Polonaise neither Kliegel nor Glemser comes within distance of Rostropovich and Argerich (DG, 2/81 – nla), whose variety of attack, colour, light and shade is, quite simply, of another order. Argerich’s ever-astonishing volatility, in particular, must be the envy and despair of other pianists. Yet if Glemser sounds earthbound by comparison, his playing is by no means lacking in voltage, while both artists revel in the opportunity for elegant acrobatics in the Grande duo concertante.
Their additions (transcriptions by Glazunov, Piatigorsky and Ginzburg) remind us how singers, violinists and cellists beg, borrow or steal Chopin from pianists at their peril. As Chopin put it, “the piano is my solid ground; on that I stand the straightest”, and his muse has proved oddly and, indeed, magically resistant to change or transcription. Still, even though the selection often suggests an alien opacity, a bloating of Chopin’s original transparency and crystalline genius, the performances are, again, most warmly committed.'