Of the three great pianists born in 1903 – Arrau, Serkin and Horowitz – Horowitz was almost certainly the most famous but it was Arrau who was surely the most ‘complete’, the Titan of the trio. Daniel Barenboim once described Arrau as his ideal: ‘Someone with an uncanny control of his instrument, with probably the widest repertoire of any pianist past or present, and with a tremendous interest in areas outside his specialisation.’ Arrau’s repertory was, indeed, huge; it was also ‘big’ in the works it included (nothing trivial, nothing for show) and astonishingly catholic, as this anniversary collection confirms.

In his early years, Arrau was a formidable virtuoso and so, in a sense, he remained. This set contains a justly revered account of Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Studies, an imaginative as well as a musical triumph, which Arrau recorded when he was in his early seventies, and a crystalline rendering of Bach’s G major Partita recorded only months before his death, at the age of 88, in 1991.

With Arrau, however, virtuosity was never an end in itself. When his unfailingly musical account of Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto was first reviewed in these columns, Max Harrison saw it as ‘a rather special case of the great pianist who has left virtuosity behind’. ‘Music rebukes us,’ Arrau once said, ‘for it is wider and richer than any of us knows.’ Like Serkin, he never filleted the music he played, never ‘de-boned’ it for easy consumption. Neville Cardus famously described Arrau as the only pianist in his experience to give us ‘Chopin the full man, artist and strong-fibred musician’; and although it didn’t necessarily please some Francophone collectors, there was a similar rigour and depth to his Debussy. (Harrison despaired of doing justice in words to Arrau’s recordings of the Préludes; Joan Chissell described them as ‘spellbinding’.)

The Chopin in the present collection is not quite as strong-fibred as it would later become. This, and the Beethoven Diabelli, were recorded in New York in the early 1950s. The reverberant acoustic of the Diabelli recording threatens to make for uncomfortable listening but the ear adjusts to the sonority. And since Arrau’s playing is not only weighty and vivid but phenomenally clear there is no musical loss. This is Arrau in the high noon of his middle years, the experience of playing Bach in the 1930s and ’40s shining through.

More than any pianist I have heard, Arrau had the ability to make a quiet, perfectly balanced chord ‘carry’ to the furthest corner of a concert hall. On record, where lesser pianists can sound a million dollars, the Arrau sound could sometimes seem too powerful, encumbered even. Similarly, the sheer intensity of the playing and a certain expressive licence often caused reviewers to waver or recoil. I remember Joan Chissell describing Arrau’s Schumann as ‘always deeply considered and deeply experienced but sometimes lacking a very necessary suggestion of careless rapture’; though, as she pointed out, he was interested to record works by Schumann that were more or less ignored by other pianists at the time. Humoreske was one such example (a much bigger work than the title suggests) and Nachtstücke, where JOC preferred Arrau’s version to the widely praised Gilels (HMV, 11/69 – nla).

The two Beethoven sonatas, Les adieux and Op 109, which precede Arrau’s memorable late account of the Fourth Piano Concerto, are painted in colours Titian might have envied. There is clarity and drive to the playing as well as a few of those hair’s-breadth arrests of rhythm which irk the metronome merchants.

In his early years, Arrau was also a passionate Schubertian, though, awed by the darkness of the later works, he later programmed them less frequently. I confess I approached his 1978 recording of the C minor Sonata with a certain trepidation. In the event, I enjoyed it a good deal and was interested to read in Jeremy Hayes’s excellent booklet essay that it was one of Arrau’s favourite records. Schubert’s Impromptus were always an Arrau speciality, though I preferred his earlier reading (EMI, 5/59 – nla) to this late remake.

Arrau’s only teacher was Martin Krause, a Liszt pupil, and it is in Liszt that we see Arrau’s true pedigree and the way that, like Busoni before him, he both embodied the German tradition and to some extent went outside and beyond it. The highlights of the anthology are the two CDs devoted to Liszt. They include the B minor Sonata (a performance for ‘special occasions’, said JOC; one of ‘the great Liszt recordings’, said MH), the unsurpassed and possibly unsurpassable account of the Transcendental Studies, and two well-chosen items from the revelatory anthology of Liszt Verdi paraphrases he recorded in 1972.

Ten-CD sets don’t come cheap and may seem less tempting when many of the constituent elements are available in advantageously priced one- or two-CD sets. Both books of Debussy’s Préludes are thus available and Arrau’s 1969 account of Brahms’s D minor Concerto with Haitink and the Concertgebouw can be found in a two-CD Brahms concerto set or in the Arrau volume in Philips’s ‘Great Pianists’ series. I don’t begrudge this: a more anguished, yet at the same time noble andfar-seeing, performance of the Brahms it is difficult to imagine. >BR>
More frustrating is the fact that, on the 100th anniversary of Arrau’s birth, some of the finest performances in this set are not currently available separately: Schumann’s Humoreske and Nachtstücke, the Liszt Verdi paraphrases and the Transcendental Studies.