During the 1994-95 concert season in Vienna Oleg Maisenberg performed a cycle of 12 piano recitals. Each evening was devoted to a single composer and Glissando’s five-CD compilation was taken live from this momentous occasion. Maisenberg is not only a pianist in the grandest Russian traditon but a wholly individual player free to explore his wide-ranging and, clearly, beloved repertoire with a transcendental imaginative resource. How one envies his Viennese audience as they listened rapt night after night to performances so fascincating and illuminating that, without a trace of narcissism or preening mannerism, every work, whether by Mozart or Debussy, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, emerged in an unforgettable way, as vivid and alive as the day it was first created.
Like Gilels and Richter, two of his greatest compatriots, Maisenberg is a superlative interpreter of Debussy and Ravel, his imaginative scope far remote from the dryness that can afflict other jaded but supposedly expert or ‘authentic’ pianists. In Ravel’s Miroirs, ‘Noctuelles’ is as luminous as it is fragile (listen to that final fluttering pianissimo) and there is an acute sense of a dangerous undertow beneath an idyllic sun-lit surface in ‘Une barque sur l’ocean’. What narcotic languor he achieves in Debussy’s ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (the title is taken from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal), what mix of stealth and aggression at the start of ‘La serenade interrompue’, the quasi-guitarre strokes snapped off with sudden violence. ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ has seldom been sung more simply or beguilingly and in ‘Cloches a travers les feuilles’ the final spiralling descent captures a profound sadness, a timeless and archaic evocation of funeral bells tolling from All Saints to All Souls Day. Maisenberg’s exceptionally slow tempos may make French pianists, in particular, recall Ravel’s caustic reminder that he wrote a Pavane for a Dead Infanta and not a dead Pavane, or view his way with the pastoral delicacy of Debussy’s Suite bergamasque as lacking in a more traditional elegance or understatement. Yet even they will surely admit that they have rarely heard a more generous, less hard-bitten response.
At the opposite extreme, Maisenberg rides the savage rhetorical storms of Liszt’s Weinen, Klagen Variations as surely, evoking the composer’s anguish and final religious solace after the death of two of his three children. On the other hand the way he allows the slow waltz of Tchaikovsky’s ‘December’ from The Seasons to blossom and evolve would seduce a saint. In Chopin he is as audacious but convincing as ever. Hear him at 16'21 in the Fantasie or in his selection of three Mazurkas and you will note a deep-dyed romanticism and despondency that few would risk in the studio.
Maisenberg is scarcely less revelatory in the great masters of Vienna, his adopted city, and so his recitals are a triumph from start to finish. Here is a pianist who in Liszt’s immortal words ‘can make emotion weep and sing and sigh...and breathe the breath of life’, a reminder of a musical stature that has sometimes seemed extinct. William Sinkovitz’s notes are excellent, Glissando’s presentation is both lavish and tasteful, the recordings are of a thrilling immediacy, and who is going to object to prolonged applause before, after and between each item when it is so richly deserved