ALFRED CORTOT

I think if there was one pianist whose recordings I could not do without, the Swiss pianist Alfred Cortot would be the one!

Cortot fortunately made innumerable recordings, and in fact his recordings of many of Chopin's works have been benchmarks - although not exclusively. Cortot is not without his controversies.

In the 1920s, 30s and 40s when Cortot made many of his recordings, engineers were less concerned with wrong notes than they are today - in some ways modern recordings can sound slightly clinical, but with Cortot we do at times have the opposite extreme!

Yet the sound of Cortot's piano, and the sound of his interpretations are, in my view at least, so marvellous and so enthralling, that the wrong notes (and at times they are innumerable!) really don't detract from what he had set in wax.

For much of Chopin, people are often divided between Alfred Cortot and Artur Rubinstein - and as much as Rubinstein does have a wonderful way in Chopin, for me Cortot has the edge. How much of it is the actual piano sound, I am not sure - but that is part of the magic of Cortot.

Cortot had a wide repertoire also - as well as Chopin and Schumann which he championed he also recorded works by Ravel, Debussy, Franck, and although no recordings exist, he is said to have performed the Rachmaninoff 3rd Concerto - at a time when many artists were to shy away from its challenges.

Cortot was also a member of a famous Trio with Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals, and they too are documented in recordings.

One of Cortot's recordings is of the Ravel Concerto in D for the Left Hand. Although his performance is of the music is performed with just the one hand as Ravel had written, Cortot had also made a re-write of the work for both hands. When Ravel got wind of this he threatened to sue...somehow I dont think Cortot's revisions were ever to see the light of day - although I might be wrong.

Latterly in his life Cortot became more and more inaccurate and his memory lapses were almost legendary. The Italian critic, Piero Rattalino wrote, that in the last post-war period Cortot was '...a ruin of a man whose memory moved from one blackout to another and whose hands went constantly astray...Cortot at 75 still attacked with vigour Chopin's 24 Etudes, and 24 Preludes, and the Schumann Concerto, but the results were amateurish'.

Harsh words and no mistake! Yet Cortot's detractors would hold to these, and even his great admirers (myself included) would have to see the pitfalls. Perhaps the risks of performing were risks that Cortot took more than most. It has also been suggested that his training in the French style suited him, but after his involvement in conducting Wagner, he was later to play in a more sonorous and resonant way, and perhaps his technique was not really adapt to it. Others have suggested that he simply went on playing too long, and with all the many activities he had such as teaching, annotating scores and so forth, he just wasn't able to keep his technique up to scratch.

Whatever, all I can suggest is that even the most unsuccessful of Cortot's recordings have a magic about them which always leaves me nothing less than captivated. He takes his chances...but I am still given to thinking that it does pay off. And after all the passing of years, his recordings remain in the catalogues, and continue to make a mark in the art of great piano playing.

I knew an elderly man who had attended a Cortot Concert. He was by that time of considerable age, and appeared almost to struggle to the piano. Yet as an encore he played Chopin's Grande Polonaise - a performance which left a lasting impression at least one audience member.

 
(the group photo shows the ever present spats!)