Was there ever a more liberated or volatile pianist than Alfred Cortot? A true virtuoso in Liszt’s sense (‘one called upon to make emotion speak, and weep and sing and sigh ...’), he threw his hat to the winds in performances tirelessly celebrated for their matchless poetic grace, wit and vitality. True, he could be erratic, even chaotic, almost as if a gremlin was misdirecting his aim, leading to the wildest inaccuracies and approximations; a confusion mercilessly lampooned by Sir Thomas Beecham. Others – Yvonne Lefebure, for example – were quick to counter such claims. For her, Cortot’s vision and zeal transcended mere correctness, his famous wrong notes ‘the wrong notes of a god’. And it is true that Cortot’s incandescence can make an obsession with musical propriety as marginal as nitpicking. Few pianists have achieved such brilliance or sported with such daredevilry in Chopin’s ‘Black Key’ Etude. What ebullience in Op. 10 No. 8, what heart-stopping, if personally charged and idiosyncratic, rubato in the slower and no less demanding Etudes (Op. 10 Nos. 3 and 6 and Op. 25 No. 7)! The ‘Revolutionary’ Etude’s left-hand part is arched and voiced in an agitated, declamatory and wholly extraordinary way and in the Etude in thirds (Op. 25 No. 6) Cortot’s spark and animation send the music gyrating into space with a nervous aplomb peculiarly his own. Such poetic brio is a far cry from, say, Pollini’s modern and chill perfection on DG (5/85), and later extends, in Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, to a cadenza as outrageous as it is ear-tickling, and some tongue-in-cheek emendations and oddities in the 11th Rhapsody which would surely have won the composer’s approval.
Again, few pianists have ‘sung’ or ‘lived’ their Schumann more audaciously or exultantly. The opening of Kreisleriana is hardly impeccable, the close rhythmically questionable, yet the performance is much less fitful than on a later recording, and time and again you hear an artist who leaves all possible circumspection to other, lesser souls. Carnaval and the Etudes symphoniques (with the ravishing posthumous etudes strategically scattered throughout) epitomize no less a lightness and vivacity inseparable from French pianism at its greatest – with the proviso that Cortot is always Cortot. Why not end both works in a bravura whirl and ‘sky’ the final chords an octave higher than written? Cortot’s Carnaval, like Rachmaninov’s, includes ‘Sphinxes’ (written so that it should not be played) and even Chopin, who could be cold and dismissive where Schumann was concerned, might have melted if he had heard Cortot’s way with the composer’s inimitable tribute.
Philips’s transfers are true and brilliant, uncannily conjuring a scintillating wit and eloquence held in awe and affection by virtually every great pianist in the world. Less memorably, Michael Steinberg’s lively accompanying essay speaks most oddly of Cortot’s ‘mimosa-like’ sensitivity and even more strangely describes, en passant, Rubinstein’s early Chopin recordings as ‘rather prosaic’.'