This invaluable issue not only confirms but greatly expands Dame Myra’s legendary status. The only known live solo recordings, taken from the University of Illinois in 1949, they show her as an often ebullient virtuoso, her regality of English fame happily blown to the winds. This was, after all, America, where she was loved with a generosity less evident in England’s more carping, nit-picking critical climate. True, Virgil Thomson’s poisonous attack (“she is not memorable like a love affair, she is useful like a well-tailored suit”) came later, but in 1949 Dame Myra clearly rode on the crest of a wave, and this disc provides a glorious compensation for her hatred of the recording studios (“I feel like I’m going to my own funeral when I hear myself play”).
Most delightful of all are pieces selected from Schubert’s German Dances, Waltzes, Landler and so on (complete with spoken introduction), diamond-chippings from the master’s workshop, and as ambivalent and confessional in their Viennese way as Chopin’s Mazurkas. Listen to Dame Myra’s buoyancy at 1'07'' in the German Dance, D783 No. 3 or hear her spinning the most insouciant of lines at 2'11'' in the Landler, D790 No. 3, the very acme of charm and brio. Her Brahms and Scarlatti are marvels of the most feline delicacy and agility, her Chopin a full-blooded example of how she could play the extrovert romantic to the hilt, storming and declaiming in the grandest of grand manners.
If her Schubert B flat Sonata is a relative disappointment that is because compared to, say, Schnabel, Kempff or, indeed, Kovacevich (her most outstanding student) it inhabits a world of old-fashioned geniality. Fearful of all possible false piety or portentousness Dame Myra is in danger of reducing some of music’s darkest poetry to the level of everyday discourse or the sort of complacency that made her seem to say, “Isn’t this a lovely work? I am so glad we can share it together” (Abram Chasins in Speaking of Pianists; Alfred and Knopf: 1957).
Such things apart, this issue is beyond price and includes a superb portrait of the artist (and a no less engaging caricature on the cover), a memorable tribute by Marshall Izen and the producer’s note explaining the recordings’ constricted sound quality. I should also add that Bryan Crimp’s work in ferreting out the tapes (clearly, the tip of an iceberg) and his generous tributes to all concerned are more than praiseworthy.'