'Her playing combines extreme exploitation of force, of masculine sculpting of tone, with the utmost lightness and elasticity of the entire playing mechanism. Hence her unbelievable endurance and joy in playing, her enormous, inexhaustible strength. Hence her thundering octaves; her staccato filed to the sharpest point; the sheen, the intensity, and the evenness of her passages; the iron heaviness of her chordal effects, inspired by the most fiery of temperaments.'
No, this is not a description of the 29-year-old Helene Grimaud but of Teresa Carreno (1853-1917), the so-called 'Walkure of the piano', as described by Walter Neumann in 1913.
Not Grimaud: but a suggestion of what her playing sounds like and the tradition within which it broadly stands; a hint, too, that faced with playing of this order of dynamism and force of will, the critic's role as disinterested arbiter is pretty well redundant. This is playing you will either thrill to or loathe. (Thrill to and loathe, possibly: we record collectors are a caring and inclusive community.)
One Carreno attribute which doesn't currently apply to Grimaud is 'the sheen, the intensity, and the evenness of her passages'. There is a reckless, headstrong quality about her playing on this record. This doesn't of itself preclude refinement and sensitivity (the moment you think that, Grimaud will conjure an effect to make you blush at the very idea), but it does seem to preclude any kind of persistent preoccupation with fineness of tone and steadiness of pulse. An aspect of her playing which is both thrilling and worrying is that you never quite know what she is going to do next. Even in Op 110 she reserves the right, amid much that is calmly and sensitively done, to throw off the velvet glove and thrash a chord into place in a way that is palpably iron-fisted.
It is a measure of Grimaud's force of personality that the sonatas do not sound small-scale after the concerto: if anything they sound bigger. Two sequences in particular stay in the mind: the exultant end of Op 110, a coronary-defying race to the summit, and the theme and variations, Gesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung, in Op 109, which Grimaud realises with terrific intensity, the playing accompanied by a good deal of audible breathing and gentle moaning, like some slow-drawn act of sexual congress.
The recordings of the two sonatas present the playing pretty much as it is: powerful, aggressive, sweeping all before it even at the cost of moments that are ungracious and unkempt. The concerto, by contrast, sounds like a big performance in a small room: the pianist centre-stage, except in the slow movement where Grimaud plays Beauty and the New York Philharmonic the Beast. (Throughout, Masur's conducting is mannerly and tough in a diplomatic 'I'm saying nothing' kind of way.)
The booklet contains artist biographies, a note on the music, and an essay by Grimaud herself entitled (I have not invented this) 'Of Wolves and Men'. Wolves, it seems, are her addiction: not the 'grim wolf with privy paw' we read about in Milton but a breed of semi-domesticated eco-warriors. After hearing this new CD, I'm not sure which would scare me most: the wolves or their dangerously gifted piano-playing protectress.'