Bridge to Another Time
Jim McClanahan | Clovis, CA USA | 03/30/2001
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This recording was done when Vlado Perlemuter was well into the Indian summer of his life. As a result, the technical prowess he showed as a younger musician is somewhat lacking. However, the spaciousness of this recording and the atmospheric feel it generates not only more than make up for that, but also are ideal for Ravel piano works. Exhibiting the "light touch" associated with the best French impressionistic performances, Vlado Perlemuter shows us why his familiarity with the composer in life is more than just an academic footnote. He breathes life into these oft-recorded masterpieces."
PLAYED IMPRESSIONISTICALLY
DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 11/20/2009
(4 out of 5 stars)
"On one of his early tours Horowitz played some Ravel to an audience including the composer, and Ravel told him that in Paris his music was played more impressionistically. Ravel did not go so far as to say that was how he wanted it played, but it must at least be highly `authentic' to do it like that. To my dismay I find that my Horowitz collection contains no Ravel, so I am having to guess what the expressions `more/less impressionistic' signify. My hunch is that it may come down to not much more than a matter of the use of the sustaining pedal.
You could not ask for a stronger link with Ravel than Perlemuter, Ravel's own pupil and Horowitz's exact contemporary, provides. These two discs, just over 2 hours between them, offer us all Ravel's music for piano solo. It is not all in the same style, and some of the works are much more `impressionistic' than others. When the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales were first performed without attribution to Ravel many failed to recognise them as his. The pastiche pieces - Le Tombeau de Couperin, A la Maniere de... -- are not impressionistic in the same way as the Miroirs are, and even among the Miroirs the Alborada del Gracioso is a very different sort of impressionistic from its companions. And I am not sure that the Pavane and the Sonatine can be helpfully described as impressionistic at all. However Perlemuter is the direct musical descendent of Ravel in Paris, he embodies that tradition as nobody else does, and it is noticeable all the way through that he is more generous than many are with the sustaining pedal.
How important is this kind of authenticity? Perhaps I can sidestep my own question by calling authenticity very significant, which surely must be a safe way of putting it. Far more significant for me is a remark of Michelangeli's to the effect that no piano could possibly be good enough for Gaspard de la Nuit. That highlights the need that I feel for absolute technical perfection in Ravel. Michelangeli referred to the need for perfection in the instrument, I would add perfection in the player's technique. By that I mean more than hitting the right notes (although in Scarbo if you listen hard you will catch that historically rare event a wrong note from Michelangeli). What I mean is a perfect balance and elegance in the touch, and from that angle Perlemuter's touch is just a fraction short of being the stuff of my dreams. All of the playing here is very good indeed. I like his Le Gibet enormously for one, with his slow tempo and the second of each pair of tolling notes played as a kind of echo of the first. I like everything he does in the pieces where his is the only performance that I own, but where I have an alternative I think I prefer the alternative in all cases except Le Gibet.
The reason for that, I'm in no doubt, is that these alternative performances are from some of the most stupendous technicians who ever played the piano. Perlemuter's Jeux d'Eau is light, elegant and beautiful, but a single effortless upward run from Cziffra tips the balance in his favour. In the horrifically difficult Alborada it is unreasonable to expect any human being to be able to play the machine-gun repeated notes evenly, and Perlemuter is only human, but Lipatti, it appears, is not. Mentioning inhuman difficulty brings me to Gaspard, and in Ondine and Scarbo I have to hand the first two places to Michelangeli and Gavrilov. Michelangeli, in a live recording from London in 1959, has the shimmering figuration at the start of Ondine to perfection, but not much if at all better than Gavrilov has it. Where he scores is in the way he recaptures it at the end, and beginning or end Perlemuter can't quite match this level of control. At the start of Scarbo Perlemuter adopts a kind of half-way touch between rapping out the repeated notes as Gavrilov does and Michelangeli's hammerless vibrato. I don't think I have any preference for any of these ways in general, but what I do look for is perfect evenness and control, and...well, you can fill in the rest. Nobody, but nobody in my opinion, has ever matched Michelangeli's extraordinary tone painting in the rest of that piece, but that is another story.
Another story still is the story of the Valses. You will not feel you are missing anything when you hear Perlemuter's fine account, and if you want to keep things that way on no account get acquainted with Michelangeli's live rendering at Arezzo in 1952. Michelangeli's performance takes a full 3 minutes longer than Perlemuter's, and 3 minutes on 14 is a big increase. The difference comes in the very slow numbers, and you will hear some awesome quiet introverted sequences as well as the morose and moody forte outbursts that make Michelangeli at that period of his career a phenomenon without parallel.
I need to say it again - there is not a single performance here that is less than very good, the recording is not bad either, the price is a bargain and even the liner note is good. I need hardly add that I don't expect everybody to give the same relative weighting as I do to technical perfection as against authenticity of tradition. These are not my values in assessing performances of other composers. Beethoven is, I'm sure, a far greater composer than Ravel, but I am not greatly fussed about perfect pianos or a perfectly even touch when I hear his sonatas played. For me, there has to be a certain artificial perfection in performing Ravel. Perlemuter is not far from it, just not quite near enough by this unreasonable standard which some other executants have been sufficiently unreasonable to satisfy for me."
Track Listings (10) - Disc #1