Here are two sharply opposed sets of the Chopin Nocturnes, as different in their distinctive ways as north and south. Idil Biret, the Turkish pianist who has now completed her 15-disc odyssey through Chopin, is an impulsive, sometimes endearingly susceptible pianist, whereas Elisabeth Leonskaja is serious and clear-sighted to the point of severity. From her, all sense of glamour, of 'embalmed darkness' and blazing passion, is sacrificed to an unflinching, almost puritanical sense of poetic truth, an admirable if limited virtue where music of such romantic volatility is concerned. Idil Biret is altogether more casual. Her pedalling is free rather than subtle—though the silvery haze she so often substitutes for a more elegant clarity is by no means unappealing—and her fitful rubato hardly carries that aura of distinction achieved by the finest Chopin pianists. Op. 9 No. 3 in B is disturbingly ill-focused from this point of view and in Op. 15 No. 1 in F her restraint is a surprising alternative to the composer's marked con fuoco. She takes a prosaic view, too, of the chanting monks of Valdemosa in Op. 15 No. 3 in G minor, and why commence the great C minor Nocturne, Op. 48 No. 1 in one tempo only to radically alter it a few bars later? Her reading of Op. 55 No. 2 in E flat is too heavy to suggest its prophecy of Faurean iridescence but, on the credit side, she plays the popular F sharp Nocturne Op. 15 No. 2 with an engaging sense of improvisation and in No. 7 in C sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 1 (the one which reminded James Huneker of a corpse washed ashore on a Venetian lagoon) she floats Chopin's austere and startlingly modern melody with a real sense of mystery and occasion. No. 19 in E minor, Op. 72 No. 1, too, is among Biret's most dramatic successes.
In extreme contrast, Elisabeth Leonskaja is, to evoke Schumann, ''almost too serious''. True, her scrupulous concern for the text (again, at the opposite pole to Idil Biret's blitheness) and general air of gravity bring their own rewards and her playing is undoubtedly finely schooled, her crystalline tone carefully moulded and projected. But isn't the start of Op. 15 No. 1 rather stiff for one of Chopin's most free-flowing Andantes, and isn't there a certain sluggishness, an essential lack of mobility in the massive advance of the C minor Nocturne's central heroics? Time and again Leonskaja takes Chopin's marking so much at face value that a certain literalness ensues, and literal Chopin Nocturnes are a virtual contradiction in terms.
Both pianists are finely recorded and both take in the two additional Nocturnes in C minor and C sharp minor. Of the two, Leonskaja is the finer pianist, Biret the more enjoyable, but my advice, even in the face of tempting bargain prices, is to bypass both and acquire EMI's recent reissue on their References label of Rubinstein's legendary 1930-7 set (see page 97); performances of a nonchalant ease and distinction that have never been equalled, let alone surpassed. This two-disc set, though it omits the two extra Nocturnes and has a few minor cuts, most generously includes both the piano concertos with Barbirolli from the same period, and I have to say that these records not only far surpass all modern alternatives, but are high on my own desert-island selection.'