Writing for Decca some years ago I recalled the words for Rogers and Harts 1940s song, 'bewitched, bothered and bewildered.' However simplistically I felt that they captured something of Cherkassy's mercurial genius. Sometimes he was one thing, sometimes two different things and sometimes he could be all three within a single work. Obsessively detailed he could be suddenly diffident. A pause for reflection as it were, could be followed by an abrupt, scurrying compensation; loving dawdles followed by sudden sprints. Yet if there were times when I remembered the American poet, Marianne Moore's words, 'there is something beyond all this fiddle,' there were others when Cherkassky had the power to erase your awareness of anyone else.
Only anxious to talk about others('Martha is a genius') he would sink into silence regarding his own playing before adding, 'people tell me I'm different, but then, I just play the way I play.' Although adamant about what he saw as the negative world of competitions and refusing all offers to appear on juries, his opinions could be shrewd and perceptive.
Quixotic to the last and caught in the final stages of his career and on the wing, the surprises in Pasadena came and went; Cherkassky's belief in freedom and spontaneity above all were paramount leading to a world where enchantment and perversity are united in a mischievous and elfin disjunction.
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CD 1's all-Chopin programme, opens with the G minor Ballade, Cherkassky's idiosyncrasy stamped on very bar. And then there is the ever-familiar E flat Nocturne, opus 9 made magically unfamiliar, the full and caressing cantabile so pronounced that as one writer put it, 'you simply wanted to tie it up and take it home with you.' The F minor Nocturne, too, suggests how long hours in the practise room(and Cherkassky was a manic practiser) were resolved in playing that could seem to come, as it were, out of the blue. His way with the Polonaise from the Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, opus 22 is more perky than conventional (but then when was Cherkassky conventional?) while the Second Impromptu ends with scales spun off prestissimo yet still with time for playful underlining. In the Second Scherzo he is off with the hare and the hounds, and in the A flat Waltz, opus 42 the mix of triple and duple time is caught to perfection, though this time with less mischievous caprice than on another recorded occasion in a 1982 San Francisco recital.
CD 2 finds him once more in ever- varying mood. As affectionate as he is precise in Lully's 'Suite de Pieces' he is bullish and hard-hitting in Tchaikovsky's outsize G major Sonata, allowing you to feel that this work needs all the affection it can get if it is not to seem overblown(it was abandoned at Moscow's Tchaikovsky Competition as a compulsory requirement after several competitors complained, seeing it as an unnecessary and laborious demand). The same composer's less ambitious Theme and Variations tell you that the phantom presence behind Tchaikovsky's romanticism(he even wrote, 'a la Schumann'' at one point) are given with a greater sense of their attraction, but two sizeable encores, Chopin's Fourth Ballade' and Polonaise-Fantasie find Cherkassky more garrulous than engaging.
CD 3 has Liszt's Don Juan fantasy, where Mozart finds himself gilded in nineteenth century virtuoso finery. Given with all of Cherkassky's aplomb you then turn to Schumann's 'Carnaval' a work whose ball-room dancers have invariably led Cherkassky into extremes. After an oddly de-vitalized opening there is a 'Valse noble' shorn of its 'noble' and a 'Eusebius' hurried out of its dream world. A great deal is turned topsy-turvy, and it is small wonder that many years ago a critic wrote of an audience driven to near violence by what Cherkassky was 'doing' to 'Carnaval.'
A dazzling 'Kaleidoscope' by Josef Hofmann, a tribute to Cherkassky's onetime teacher, is followed by the pianist's own brief but eloquent tribute to his Russian roots in his 'Prelude pathetique,' but he makes something loose and inconsequential out of Chopin's Barcarolle, one of the composer's supreme masterpieces. He is relatively subdued in the finale from the Schumann Fantasie(technical problems with the recording equipment explain the absence of the other two movements).
Elsewhere everything is predictably unpredictable. Supreme master in the Gounod-Liszt Faust Waltz, Cherkassky returns to several of his favourite encores, the Albeniz-Godowsky Tango and the Rachmaninov Polka, but in Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, he leaves poise and stability to others.
Arguably the most instantly recognisable of all great pianists, whether allowing his genius to flow and emerge without impediment or teasing the life out of music, Cherkassky remains inimitably Cherkassky. At his greatest he was beyond compare.
Bryce Morrison