One of the first pianists to truly capture me was Dinu Lipatti. My first encounter with his name was an odd one: I was looking through my high school record collection back in the 80s, and inside a sampler from the Angel label was mention of a 2-LP set entitled "Dinu Lipatti's Last Recital." I had never heard of him and the rather morbid name of the album caught my attention. I asked my high school teacher about him, and she said "Oh, he was a pianist's pianist."I started looking for his records, and sure enough, his playing was captivating. My ears were not yet well trained to recognize what he was doing that made his playing so extraordinary, but there was a groundedness to his interpretations that held me. The story of his tragically young death in 1950 at the age of 33 from Leukemia (more accurately Hodgkin's Disease) was no less intriguing. His recordings of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin - those that I could get my hands on - demonstrated a level of spiritual certainty and calm mastery of pianism.
I was not prepared for what I heard when I found his one recording of a work by Ravel, however. I had never heard 'Alborada del Gracioso' before, but was stunned by the incredible virtuosity of Lipatti's interpretation, one that features a technical command that one would not have thought possible from any pianist, let alone one who was supposedly so ill. In particular, three glissandi near the end of the work left me speechless:
This was clearly not the anemic pianist that was written about in the liner notes to his recordings! He was achieving the impossible here: the dynamic control was phenomenal, in particular in the third glissando, where he goes from a raging fortissimo to a delicate pianissimo. And if you look at the score, these are not just straight glissandi: they are double-note glissandi played with the right hand. Most pianists play them at half the speed and without much dynamic variation. Lipatti was obviously, before his illness took its grasp, a stunning technician as well as a brilliant musician. I began to wonder if his illness led him to record works that didn't tax his strength and if his recorded output therefore perhaps did not fully represent his abilities, and I also wondered if concert recordings of a wider repertoire existed.
While I did discover that some concert performances had been found and released, I was still surprised by how relatively few there were; most also either duplicated works he recorded in the studio or composers whose works he had recorded. When I read in an essay by his wife that he had played the Beethoven Waldstein Sonata at the same broadcast session that had yielded an issued recording of the Enescu Third Sonata, I decided to take action - he had never made a commercial recording of Beethoven, and the Waldstein was my favourite - and I started writing to European archives and collectors to see what I could find.
Although I did not find the Waldstein (not yet, anyway), I did manage to locate a performance of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto and to get a tape by visiting the German radio station that had recorded the broadcast. This was an important find as Lipatti had not commercially recorded any 20th Century piano concertos other than his own Concertino In Classical Style. But more on the Bartok later. On the same 1990 trip to Europe, I visited the National Sound Archive (as it was then known) in London. I decided to search through the card catalogue not just under Lipatti's name but under the works he had performed in case something had been misfiled. And I hit the jackpot.
Under Liszt, I found a card indicating a performance of Lipatti playing Liszt's La Leggierezza to be found on tape 101W. Lipatti had recorded the work in 1946 but the master records had warped and it was never release; it turned out that this tape was not that recording, but rather a BBC broadcast performance recorded off the air by an amateur. I would eventually co-produce a 2-CD set that would include this performance with the cooperation of the BBC and the NSA.
Lipatti's interpretation here is spell-binding and shows his enormous command of pianistic technique and his ability to play in both a heroic and poetic manner. One of the aspects of his interpretation that I find so unique is how in the rapid runs in the clip below, he accelerates as he approaches the upper notes of the runs while also getting softer, giving the phrases an almost circular feeling:
In 1991 I visited a Swiss collector, one Dr. Marc Gertsch, who had obtained many items from Lipatti's widow's collection - concert programs, photos, personal items...and some recordings. Among these was a performance of the Liszt First Concerto, a work Lipatti never recorded commercially. He had recorded only the Schumann and Grieg Concertos, and his interpretations are magnificent and definitely bear witness to his incredible technique and musicianship; however, to hear Lipatti in such a virtuosic work as the Liszt E-Flat would give a very different impression of the artist. The acetate discs were worn and I did not get to hear the work at this time (Gertsch did, however, give me a monogrammed shirt of Lipatti's - a rather morbid gift which I nevertheless appreciated). Gertsch was eventually convinced to have the records remastered and then released by my colleague Werner Unger, then owner and director of the 'archiphon' label.
In this Liszt performance too, despite the poor sound quality, one can hear Lipatti demonstrate phenomenal technique applied musically, and that sense of 'how could it be done any other way?'. In this cadenza from the Allegro Animato, Lipatti brings a brooding, sinister atmosphere through rumbling bass effects and arched phrasing in the melody. One would expect all pianists to play it this way and yet I have never heard this section played with such an ominous atmosphere:
The sad story of Lipatti's illness and early death, and the limited repertoire he recorded commercially, have together painted an image of a pianist that is more restricted than he in fact was. As the recording clips above demonstrate, he was not only a musically grounded artist, he was a stunning virtuoso with tremendous strength and bravura put to the service of music.
I will be featuring more rare Lipatti performances on this blog in future posts. You can also read more about Lipatti on my website at http://markainley.com/music/classical/lipatti/index.html
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