‘Emil Gilels – The Giant’, RCA’s title for this two-disc tribute, rings true. Few pianists have been more masterly or richly inclusive. Magisterial, even autocratic, all these performances, taken live from Moscow recitals between 1965 and 1984 show virtuosity with a human face.
Gilels’s Mozart is as arrestingly bold as his Beethoven, making the supposed gap between their Apollonian and Dionysian genius narrow rather than widen. His D minor Fantasia throbs with a prophecy of romantic volatility, with presto cadenzas that flash like summer lightning and a final Allegretto more red-blooded than conventionally courtly or piquant. His A minor Sonata is characteristically expansive and confrontational, his Beethoven anything but circumspect, including a richly communing central Adagio in the Pathetique Sonata and a virtuosity in the 32 Variations dazzling and imposing enough to have altered, one imagines, the composer’s low opinion of his work. Schubert, on the other hand, might have begged for a gentler sense of perspective in his Six moments musicaux. You can almost hear No 5 cry out for mercy as Gilels grabs it by the throat and, more generally (and for all his quality), shows himself less confidential or complete than such celebrated Schubertians as, say, Artur Schnabel or Edwin Fisher.
Ravel, too, might have been startled by Gilels’s storming climax to his Jeux d’eau, awed but piqued by his lack of that French ‘cool’ and precision central to Ravel’s ambiguous, outwardly urbane nature. On the other hand he would surely have capitulated before Gilels’s pulverising relish in Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole or his thundering passion in the finale of Scriabin’s Third Sonata.
Throughout, there is ample evidence of the Russian indifference to mere accuracy and their setting of only the highest communicative goals. RCA’s recordings are understandably variable, and their accompanying essays graceless and superficial, yet no lovers of this great pianist, artist and visionary should be without these records.'