Music: Play, Memory. - Review - video recording review

National Review, July 31, 2000 by Jay Nordlinger

Music is in love with its past, and why not? There is a lot to love. Six years ago, the Teldec label scored a huge success with a video (also shown on public television) called The Art of Conducting: Great Con ductors of the Past. In two hours, we see all of them, or many of them, including the near-mythical Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922) on silent film. A few years later, NVC Arts (a company related to Teldec) brought out The Art of Singing: Golden Voices of the Century-from Caruso to, roughly, Callas (this century stops a little short). Music primarily has to do with hearing, but seeing-as on these videos-has its rewards as well.

Now it is the turn of The Art of Piano: Great Pianists of the 20th Century (also from NVC Arts). The gang is not quite all here-hard choices had to be made-but a fine twenty are. The video is done in happy conjunction with the Philips label, which has produced the massive, sprawling series that shares the name Great Pianists of the 20th Century. In this 100-volume collection, the gang is all present and accounted for (and it is augmented by many pianists who only by extreme charity can be termed "great"). Philips claims that its small trunk of CDs represents is "the largest project ever undertaken by a recording company in the history of recorded music"-a credible boast.

The video begins with a pastiche of pianists playing the Beethoven Sonata in F Minor, Op. 57, known as the Appassionata. Doing the honors are Solomon (just one name, please-like Cher), Claudio Arrau, Myra Hess, Sviatoslav Richter, and Artur Rubin stein. The footage that follows is eye-rubbingly wonderful: Ignace Paderew ski, in a hokey feature film, and as prime minister of Poland; Emil Gilels, during World War II, playing before Soviet troops, outdoors, on a platform; Alfred Cortot, preening shamelessly during a master class. Many of us- all but the oldest and most privileged-have the chance to see, for the first time, pianists we have only heard, through our stereos. Who knew that Josef Hofmann was a head-bobber? that Cortot sat so close to the keyboard, and low? that Benno Moiseiwitsch picked his hands so high?

Seeing, in music, is normally a distraction, or a snare; better to keep our eyes good and shut. But the thrill of seeing is impossible to deny, and, now and then, instructive.

It is hard to stand out among the titans shown in The Art of Piano, but one rather does: Gyorgy Cziffra. He is almost a rediscovery. A brilliant and tragic figure, Cziffra was known mainly for his gymnastic Liszt. He was never given his due-stereotyped as a mad technician-and is today remembered only by a handful of cultists (which includes, however, some of our better pianists). Cziffra may well be the most underrated pianist of the 20th century. Harold C. Schoenberg, in his bible of piano history, The Great Pianists, neglects even to mention him. But the new documentary places Cziffra where he belongs-in a pantheon-and several remastered recordings, including those in the Philips series, provide all the evidence we need that here was a musician of the first order.

The Cziffra story is one of music's most intriguing: He was born in 1921, to poor Gypsies in Hungary. The home-this was Hungary, after all- had a piano, which the child immediately made his plaything. (Hungary, of course, has produced pianists the way Iowa once produced farmers.) At age five, he performed at a Budapest circus. His formal training was scant, but of the highest quality: a little time with Ernst von Dohnanyi; a little more time with Gyorgy Ferenczy. He was drafted into Hungary's army, then imprisoned by the Soviets in 1941. Released only in 1947, he performed in bars and nightclubs, to support himself, his wife, and their son. In 1950, he tried to flee the country, which got him three years' hard labor in a camp. This master pianist carried and broke stones in a quarry. In 1956, when the Soviet tanks rolled in again, he managed, with his family, to walk out of Hungary, into the free West. As he was to say, it was then that his life really began.

He enjoyed many fruitful years of concert work, but could never-thanks to ignorant critics and the vagaries of musical fashion-shake the stigma of a mere finger phenomenon, still, in a way, performing tricks under the big top. When he died in 1994, obituaries said things like, "Played Liszt's Hun garian Rhap sodies."

About that Liszt: It can hardly be ignored, because it is stupendous- without parallel. The Cziffra volume in the Philips set offers a generous dose of it. To hear Cziffra in this music is to be confronted with what ought to be impossible. The playing is marked by dizzying command and precision-also a penetrating musicality. There is terrific dance in Cziffra's hands. His phrasing is sensitive, and his passagework is crystalline. Everything is amazingly clear, and eerily accurate. The playing is tight, yet with fluency and give. Lisztian bombast recedes into the background. Cziffra has a sure sense of the arc of a piece. As virtuosic as this playing is-and none could be more so-it is not primarily virtuosic; it is primarily musical. This is, in fact, the gift of technique: Because the notes can be taken for granted, music-making has pride of place.