From time to time there are references to the perfect pianist, but mercifully, and above all humanly, there is no such thing. Those who seek perfection are chasing the Holy Grail; a fiction. Even Dinu Lipatti, the pianist most readily credited with perfection, was unimpressed with many of the performances given during his tragically short life. For others his recording of the Chopin Barcarolle, in particular, remains an ultimate, of a poetic and pianistic refinement unknown elsewhere. And yet he was unhappy with the result and planned a further attempt to come closer to Chopin's ever- elusive spirit.
To take another key example. Michelangeli's manager accused hm of seeking the impossible, of playing the same repertoire repeatedly in a meaningless quest rather than allowing himself the joy and fulfilment of a wider repertoire. And turning to a later generation, I recall an interview with Krystian Zimerman where I exclaimed in wonder over his recording of the Liszt Sonata. But he was disenchanted. There had been no less than six attempts to place his reading on record, a series of returns to the studio with only the sixth performance considered 'acceptable.' He remained tormented by its release.
So where does true musical greatness lie? What is of prime importance is the recreation of an inner emotional strength and projection that whatever flaws occur en route achieves a transcendental quality above and beyond a more 'correct' and too often sterile offering. Happiness and satisfaction can be short-lived and I recall Artur Rubinstein telling me of his first joy after completing a recording only to find it later incomplete, his joy clouded by the static nature of the recording, of the proverbial fly in amber as new possibilities, an ever new sense of recreation occur('Initiallly I tell everyone to come in and listen, the milk man, the post man, only to feel deflated. I have already changed and moved on, but the recording remains the same')
There is a certain irony that two of the greatest of all pianists, Schnabel and Cortot were as celebrated for their lack of perfection as for their vision, the former principally in Beethoven, the latter in Chopin. To an anxious producer alarmed over Schnabel's less than precise performance of the massive octave outburst in the first movement of Brahm's D minor Concerto, he replied, 'I could play it more accurately but I couldn't play it more brilliantly.' As Claude Franck(who studied with Schnabel)
put it to me many years later, Schnabel's playing was above and beyond mere accuracy and his technique was 'so brilliant.'
For Cortot's admirers his wrong notes were 'the wrong notes of a God,'(Yvonne Loriod) better, certainly more interesting, than other people's right notes. Today, both Schnabel and Cortot would be viewed as a liability in the recording studio, inviting a time-consuming removal of inaccuracy and instability by the often dead hand of the producer, a concern with a pseudo-scientific perfection alien to genuine re-creation and liberation. Again, Samson Francois' 1947 recording of Ravel's 'Scaarbo' may be wild and inaccurate, but it is also the most macabre and spine-tingling.
Yet discussing this issue with the great Czech pianist Ivan Moravec was revealing. Aware of my love for Cortot(a love he shared) he remarked, 'but don't you think it an additional wonder if the pianist's instinct for poetry is complemented by a crystalline pianistic perfection(he cited Michelangeli and Zimerman as key examples.) Moravec was himself a tireless perfectionist, yet never at the expense of personal communication and musical quality. Moravec's unity of mastery and vision is at the opposite pole to a disgraced official at the Artur Rubinstein Piano Competition who claimed that the jury demanded no less than 'perfection' per se. Such sterility runs counter to Rubinstein's own musical vision.
Glenn Gold's decision to abandon public performance in favour of an exclusive devotion to the recording studio-- an escape from a dreaded relationship with his audience-- came at a price. Controversy will always rage over his undoubted genius(see my article in the International Piano Quarterly) but many of his records are a testament to an eccentric and wilful indifference to music's underlying humanity.
Having spent many happy and unhappy hours in recording studios I have been witness to the dreaded world of play backs; when the artist is invited to listen to their performance, hopefully for their approval and when , in a flash, the sub- conscious becomes conscious. The 'tidying up' or hygienic undertaking by the producer can so easily create one thing at the expense of another(' your D flat was slightly smudged,' 'you make an unmarked accelerando here,' 'this passage was not entirely clear, that one was rhythmically slack' etc etc) I recall watching a film of Van Cliburn and his mother(the formidable Rildia Bea O'Bryan Cliburn) nit- picking their way through his recording of Chopin's B minor Sonata; 'this was not quite this, that was not quite that' etc) The result is a performance whilst accurate and indeed 'perfect' at one level is disappointingly void of the charismatic warmth and rhapsody that has so mesmerised Cliburn's Moscow audience and jury at the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition.
More humorously, Cyril Smith's attempted recording of Balakirev's 'Islamy' ended, as he stormed to the finish, in a wild inaccuracy prompting him to shout an unprintable expletive. With no editing process he was compelled to re-record that monstrous piece of virtuosity in its entirety. Eileen Joyce, too, spoke of a time when you had to get things right the first time, If not then you had to return to square one and so it was advisable to arrive at the studio as secure as possible.
Finally, I would like to end with a comment made by Myra Hess after listening to her student, Ann Schein play Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy. 'Well, it wasn't quite perfect, was it!' This seemingly innocent, even naive remark, contained a vital insight. She was not talking about technique(Ann Schein's command was already legendary) but of a missing ingredient. For Hess the playing, for all its brio, lacked an essential inwardness and calibre, the hall- marks of a truly arresting and revelatory performance.
Bryce Morrison