Alexis Weissenberg is the ultimate shaker and mover of pianists, a Tamburlaine of the keyboard who deploys his force and cunning with a hypnotic verve and controlled fury. Characterized by an American critic as a romantic fantasist who can make sado-masochists quiver in recognition, he seems to tell us that beneath every outwardly warm or civilized gesture lies a dark and unpalatable truth. Doubtless he would agree with D. H. Lawrence that the sesame seed in the nougat adds a sharpness, a countering of sweetness and a suggestion of cruelty that can be vivifying and enhancing.
English critics have generally listened askance to such playing before dipping their pens in vitriol, while other countries, notably America and Japan, have begged to differ. Yet even Weissenberg’s strongest detractors will find his Bach D major Partita of a crystalline perfection and unfailing musical strength and sensitivity. The Courante is elegantly shaped and nuanced and if the performance, in its razor-sharp articulacy, is a clear relation of Gould’s Bach, it is quite without his alternately enthralling and infuriating perversity. Weissenberg’s Scarlatti, too, is superb. His musical quality may be less apparent when the virtuoso heat is on yet there is no denying his strikingly inflected brilliance both here and in Czerny’s La ricordanza (music once inseparable from Horowitz’s name), and in hyphenated Bach which he plays with an awe-inspiring command and, in the case of Bach-Siloti, with a quiet devotional feeling (though how one misses the rapt repeat included by Gilels, his unvariable and unforgettable farewell to his recitals).
But what of the demonic, supercharged Weissenberg, the pianist whose virtuosity is almost palpable or visceral in its impact, who can make the multiplicity of ideas in Rachmaninov’s First Sonata ricochet from point to point like crazed bullets? A more embattled stance would be hard to imagine and as the final fusillades of triplet chords ring out you may well feel that this is among the most scorching performances ever committed to disc. At the start of the first-movement development he whirls you skyward at a terrifying pace, an acceleration like suddenly applied centrifugal force. His Prokofiev is the fastest on record but if his Stravinsky is more a mechanical than virtuoso tour de force, at times hard and unyielding, it is of a savage and unique aplomb, much of it punched out with the finality of a stamping machine. Then there are Weissenberg’s Chopin Nocturnes, no soft or hazy option but music ablaze with night’s passions as well as its whispered confidences. His Debussy is even more provocative, his Estampes steel etchings (his gardens pelted with hail rather than rain) hardly awash with, say, Gieseking’s iridescence.
Urs Mattenberger’s accompanying essay is, frankly, unfortunate, but the recordings emanating from a variety of sources, including CBS, RCA, DG and EMI and dating from 1955-87, have come up for the most part excellently. All Weissenberg’s many records should be reissued for, love him or hate him – and no pianist has divided opinion so incisively – he remains among the most powerful and compulsive voices in twentieth-century pianism.'