Gieseking of the Keys

AS A LIFE-LONG INSOMNIAC, I grew up dependent on overnight radio listening to ease the struggle to get to sleep. But you know me. I sought classical-music stations for solace. And, because I grew up in the New York metropolitan area, I had a choice of several. That is, until WNBC-FM abandoned the format, followed pretty much by WBAI. WFUV and WKCR were only sporadically classical by the time I discovered them, and WRVR was bizarrely unpredictable. That left WNYC, which intruded too many public-affairs programs for my taste, WNCN, and WQXR. (There was also Bridgeport, Conn., anomaly WJZZ, profiled here.) And the overnight programming I liked best was anything offered by Bill Watson, a silken-voiced polymath with very specific tastes who gypsied from station to station. (You can hear a recording of him here.)

Watson was particularly fond of tenor Jussi Bjoerling and pianist Walter Gieseking, and Gieseking’s Mozart especially grabbed my ear. The combination of his gentle but no-nonsense performances and the warm recorded sound was hypnotic. While working for a classical radio station in 1981, I cassette-taped an eleven-LP set of Mozart piano music that Gieseking recorded in London in 1953-54. I transferred the cassettes to minidiscs (o much-missed format!) 20 years later, and not long after that sent them to a hard drive. Those journeys weren’t always kind.

Which is intended to explain my fanatical joy at receiving the 48-CD boxset of Gieseking’s “Columbia Graphophone Recordings,” covering the bulk of the studio recordings he made between 1923 and 1956, when he died suddenly. That’s a lot of listening, only somewhat ameliorated by the fact that he revisited some of the repertory here more than once, so you may wish to ration yourself.

Gieseking’s Mozart isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I find it sublime, companions that have been with me for so long that these eight CDs are associated with memories locked into each of the decades going back to the 1970s. Which means that my critical faculties are probably eclipsed by emotion.

Not so with the Debussy works so generously scattered across this set. Gieseking became synonymous with Debussy, championing that composer throughout a troublesome career. There are Preludes, both books, from the 1950s – twice! – and earlier (1938) trip through Book I (Book II, recorded the following year, belongs to a different label). That composer’s legacy here begins on Disc 1, with a 1923 recording of “Reflets dans l'eau” and the Two Arabesques, and it never stops.

By 1954, he’d recorded all the known solo piano music by Debussy and even the Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra, and he still had time to finish out the year recording the complete solo piano music by Ravel. And if that sounds like an assembly-line project, it won’t when you’re actually listening to it. These are benchmark performances, thoughtful, nuanced, simmering with deep emotion, yet never succumbing to the over-interpretive nonsense that plagues many pianists today (looking at you, Daniil Trifonov). It must also have been the case in 1926, when Gieseking was quoted as saying, “I feel that the whole conception of performance in these days is too heavy, loud and blatant. I prefer less power but, instead, more delicacy and ethereal refinement of tone.”

This is especially evident in his Beethoven interpretations. Gieseking provides a refreshing contrast to the two-fisted Arthur Schnabel approach, and would have left us a fulfilling sonatas cycle had he not died while those recordings were in progress. As it is, we have 25 of the 32, missing mostly the mid-20s, and even those are out there in broadcast performances. Listen to the Sonata No. 18, the “Hunt,” and hear where Rubinstein picked up interpretive hints of some delicacy. Listen to the sprightly “Waldstein,” the two-fisted yet not-overpowering “Appassionata.”

And then the three concertos you’ll find here. We get 1 twice, 4 and 5 three times apiece – largely staying within the interpretive bounds he obviously set early on, but offering different relationships with the different orchestras. And there’s a Beethoven bonus in the Quintet for Piano and Winds he recorded with an ensemble that included Dennis Brain.

There’s a smidgen of Bach, ten works by Chopin, some sublime solo Brahms, and the best versions of Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces” you’ll ever hear. Gieseking brought out the folk character of each as if he were himself a native Norwegian.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sings Mozart arias on the only disc given over to vocal works, rounded our by songs by Gieseking himself. We have a nice tour through a handful of Schumann, and I’d say ditto about Schubert except that, again, those Impromptus recordings set another unbestable bar.

The admirable audio restoration was by Christophe Hénault of Studio Art & Son,  “from best available sources for the 78-era recordings and the original tapes for those from the age of LP.” Good enough for me – and you’re going to treasure them, too.

Walter Gieseking
His Columbia Graphophone Recordings
(The Complete Warner Classics Edition)