Marston's second two-disc tribute to Ernst Levy (born in Switzerland in 1895 though American-based for most of his life) focuses primarily on Haydn and Beethoven and displays a bewildering mix of shortcomings and strengths. The accompanying essays, on the other hand, have few doubts, proclaiming Levy a 'forgotten genius' and an artist of the calibre of Schnabel, Backhaus, Kempff and Solomon. But if there is little to suggest pianists of this magnitude there is still much which is enjoyable and provocative. Levy's Haydn may be freely expressive, in a style guaranteed to raise hackles in some quarters, but it is invariably deft and musicianly. There is a remarkable stillness and composure at the start of the A flat Sonata's central Adagio, and if the finale is taken too fast for optimum clarity it is certainly dashing and exhilarating. There is an endearing, rather than anachronistic, romantic leeway at 0'40'' in the C major Sonata's Adagio, and in the flanking movements an open-hearted delight in Haydn's volte face, where the listener's expectations are so mischievously challenged and thwarted.
Levy's Beethoven is less satisfying, with an evasive, fast-flowing finale to Op 90 and an oddly stilted (rather than seraphic) start to Op 109. Much of the Appassionata Sonata sounds like an endlessly protracted cadenza, Beethoven's raging passions diminished rather than augmented by such a lack of musical rigour. Opus 110, too, offers another example of the way Levy's fussy agogic gestures, his unmarked easings and accelerations frustrate the music's natural line and impetus, while his two encores are full of wilful exaggerations (his nagging and insistent rubato in the principal theme of Mozart's D minor Fantasia, his inebriated three-in-a-bar replacing an authentic Viennese lift in the Strauss- Grunfeld transcription). The recordings, dating from 1929 to 1958, have come up well, but despite passing felicities in the Haydn sonatas it is difficult not to see these performances as the capricious commentary of a pianist more irresponsible than way-out.
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