In his accompanying essay, John Ardoin puzzles over the failure of Nelson Freire’s cult following to expand into wider recognition. Yet his claim that Freire’s Mozart, Chopin, Schumann and Brahms are ‘searching and revealing’ is generously pitched. True, Freire’s Schumann, taken live from a Berlin recital in 1972, is a vibrant surprise for those who know him as a pianist more celebrated for fleetness than individuality: here, unusually, his playing is romantically charged and rhapsodic, settling into the first movement Im Legendenton with ease and grace and finding a haunting sense of Eusebian rapture in the concluding Adagio. He plays exhilaratingly close to the edge in the central March (audaciously so in the coda, that locus classicus of the wrong note). His Etwas langsamer is full of wonder and story-telling, and in the finale Schumann’s kaleidoscopic shifts of mood and perspective are seen through an almost Debussian lointain. In Godowsky’s labyrinthine Die Fledermaus paraphrase, too, Freire breaks free of his customary constraint, tempted into magnanimity both here and in the same composer’s elaboration of Richard Strauss’s Standchen. The Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody is another major success, with added embellishment, truly piano as well as vivace glissandos and an authentically swaggering forte brioso finish.
So why does Freire’s Mozart, Brahms and much of his Chopin tell a different story? His Mozart may be impeccable but it offers too little, and his Brahms, while hardly unmusical, is oddly flavourless and unmemorable. Try the Poco piu lento of the Andante espressivo and you will find yourself returning to cherished discs by the likes of Lupu and Curzon, to playing that glows with a very different warmth and intensity. Freire’s nonchalance also colours page after page of the Chopin B minor Sonata (his neat rather than imposing start, his nonchalant dismissal of the Scherzo’s central Trio and a misreading at 5'19'' that should have been retaken). Even his finale is facile rather than given with a true virtuoso frisson. The Mazurkas (again, live, this time from Miami) are more sophisticated and engaging, but Liszt’s Totentanz remains obstinately lightweight, without a proper sense of diablerie or malignancy. The recordings are mostly successful but this is a very mixed bag, one where ardour and diffidence alternate and parade with a sad and bewildering inconsistency.'