How he achieves suchįorte playing without harshness is a constant miracle. Rubinstein reserves his best performance for the famous B-flat minor Scherzo, where he offers a greater dynamism and intersperses telling silences between phrases so that each section leads naturally to the next. Rubinstein sounds a little tame after this. What a shame she gives us just one Scherzo here. Despite her faster tempo, the music breathes more easily. She keeps the dynamic range of her playing within careful bounds in the development in order to set up the magnificent climax. From the very first notes you know that Argerich is in total command of sound and structure, and that technical difficulties simply do not exist for her. This performance is electric and dazzling.
To understand this, you need only play Martha Argerich's Debut Recital, which features the C-Sharp Minor Scherzo in first-rate sound. Yet the rubato is not quite so natural as in his later playing, and I wondered at times if the artist needed the stimulus of a live audience to spur him to greater heights. Detracting slightly from the sound on the first three Scherzos are some occasional low-level ticks and scrapes on the left channel.īut there is no short measure in Rubinstein's performance, which is full-blooded and well constructed, with perfectly judged tempos.
This is particularly useful given the sudden sharp attack we hear, for instance, at 6m28s into the B minor Scherzo. The dynamic range captured here is very wide.
The piano is not quite so well captured as on the Chopin Sonata disc, with slightly less body to the piano, but it does sound remarkably full and clear for its age, and puts many later piano recordings to shame.
But JVC does bring these fine performances to us in the best sound they have had over the years, and I thank them for that. This disc can be added to the list of recommended recordings, but it does not represent the very pinnacle of Rubinstein's Chopin or displace my top recommendation in this repertoire, Sviatoslav Richter (SXLP 30510).Īt its steep price and very short playing time (37m21s), this is among the most expensive recordings per minute of music. The four Scherzos, written at different times in Chopin's life, rank among his finest works and have elicited some very fine performances over the years. This is the third of the Arthur Rubinstein recordings from the 50's and 60's recently reissued on the JVC XRCD24 label.
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