Apart from the two Schubert Impromptus, the programme of Lipatti's last recital consisted of works he'd recorded only some ten weeks earlier for EMI, in a Geneva studio, while enjoying a miraculous cortisone-wrought new lease of life. However, when honouring this Besancon Festival engagement on September 16th, 1950, very much against the advice of his doctors, leukaemia had once more gained the upper hand. Less than three months later he was dead, still only 33.
As those of us who have long cherished the original LPs already know, the only evidence of weakness was the omission of the last of the concluding Chopin Waltzes (in his own favoured sequence, that in A flat, Op. 34 No. 2). For the rest, the recital stands as ''one of the great musical and human statements, a testimony to his [Lipatti's] transcendental powers, an almost frightening assertion of mind over matter'' as BM puts it in his sympathetic introductory note. Yet again I marvelled at the clarity of articulation and part-playing in the Bach Partita, at once so attentive to craftsmanly cunning yet so arrestingly unpedagogic and alive. For Mozart he finds a wonderfully translucent sound-world, rich in subtleties of colouring—not least in the slow movement's laden song. And as in the two Schubert Impromptus, the musical message is all the more affecting for its totally selfless simplicity and purity of expression. Even if just one or two of the Waltzes might be thought too fast, with over-swift internal tempo change for contrasting episodes, his gossamer lightness of touch and mercurial imaginative fancy explain why his way with them to quote BM again, has now acquired ''legendary status''.
My only small regret is that this most excellently remastered medium-price CD deprives us of the endearingly spontaneous extended arpeggio with which Lipatti prefaced the opening Partita, as if in greeting to his instrument, and likewise the improvisatory modulation with which he carried his Besancon listeners from Bach's B flat major to Mozart's A minor.'