It seems only yesterday that I was reviewing reissues of Cortot’s Schumann on both Dante and Biddulph (6/92). Here are all the solo items once more, this time on the California-based Music & Arts label. Biddulph’s Schumann offering (my original preference) came on three separate discs and included the Piano Concerto with the LSO under Sir Landon Ronald, the D minor Piano Trio with Thibaud and Casals and the Dichterliebe with Charles Panzera; no mean extras. But it is good to have the Music & Arts more sharply focused issue on a well-presented two-CD set. And in any case, the very plentitude of alternatives suggests the timeless appeal of Cortot’s evergreen, ever-fresh performances. How many artists, today, I wonder, could hope to garner such tribute?
So here, again, is that magically floated cantabile tugging at the heart-strings in “Des Abends” (how one longs for the rest of the cycle) yet maintained with the flawless line and impetus of a great singer. In the Davidsbundlertanze, one of Cortot’s most poetically potent if battle-scarred recordings, his confusion in Florestan’s schneller in No. 3 or in the vaulting leaps of No. 12 is, perhaps, not quite what the composer had in mind in his instruction, Mit Humor. Yet who can resist his dolce cantando in No. 14, the gem of his Schumann, alive with a rich polyphonic pianistic tradition that Alfred Brendel so sadly claims has virtually vanished from the music scene. In Kinderszenen the ‘poet’ of the epilogue is at once Schumann and Cortot, creator and re-creator, and in the Etudes symphoniques the gold-dust scattering of the posthumous studies throughout the main work is done with such passion and inwardness that only a Beckmesser could possibly object.
Playing like this seems light years away from today’s style or standard, though I should perhaps add that, judging by Radu Lupu’s recent London recital in the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the Bunte Blatter and Davidsbundlertanze), all is far from lost (Decca please note). But pace Cortot, his idiosyncrasy, his pell-mell virtuosity and poetic ecstasy may strike a foreign and even alien note in our more puritan times yet, as Yvonne Lefebure so eloquently put it, “even his wrong notes were those of a God”.'