Russian-born Busoni pupil Leo Sirota (1885-1965) lived for many years in Japan, where the greater part of this recital was recorded two years before his death. The Liszt items date from 1955, and a few brief words (when the 75-year-old pianist cheerfully confessed to feeling 65) were recorded in his St Louis home in 1960. The vicissitudes of his career are charted by Allen Evans in his accompanying essay, and all these performances recall a time when many pianists saw themselves as masters rather than servants of the composer.
Indeed, Sirota’s throwback playing of Beethoven and Schubert seems odd when you consider that such powerful but scrupulous pianists as Schnabel, Backhaus and Kempff lived and played in roughly the same musical era. Such free and easy romanticism invites a divided response. For some, Sirota’s ‘grand manner’ scorns pedantry while others will retort that it is possible to play with discipline as well as fantasy. On the one hand there is nothing niggardly about Sirota’s aplomb in the finale of Beethoven’s Op 31 No 3 Sonata; on the other you are left wondering why the profoundly expressive trio from the Scherzo of Schubert’s great A minor Sonata D845 is distorted by so many coy nudges for attention.The omission of the finale’s closing accelerando, too, omits much sense of the music’s manic end. Sirota milks what he sees as Scarlatti’s incipient romanticism for all it is worth, and if Liszt’s Don Giovanni Fantasy is battle-scarred it is also enlivened by many startling bass reinforcements, particularly when the going becomes strenuous. None the less this issue has considerable curiosity value, and if the sound recedes alarmingly shortly after the start of Liszt’s Sposalizio, it adequately captures the sense of occasion elsewhere.'