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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
THROUGH THE RECORDED SOUND DARKLY, 19 May 2005
It's the recorded quality here, sad to say, that precludes a higher rating for what sounds to be some top-class playing. I don't hear much of Petri these days, so it was a pleasure to see this reissue. In the liner-note the producers, Marina and Victor Ledin, explain the processes involved in the restoration of these performances, recorded variously in the years 1937-40. My real disappointment came when I saw that the sets of variations had been done in the Abbey Road studio in Kilburn. Beecham had been given some remarkably good sound when he moved to Abbey Road for his Delius series (involving large choral and orchestral forces) in 1936, and the sound to the classic Brain/Busch/Serkin record of Brahms's horn trio, done even earlier, is still pretty respectable to this day. No such luck for Petri, unfortunately. It is simply impossible here to get any clear or realistic idea of his tone-production, and I sense that this is a major loss. I hear, for instance, some very sprightly fingerwork in the third variation from book II of the Paganini set and some very interesting left-hand effects in the 'Hungarian funeral march' variation in the Handel work, and there is simply no way of telling what his forte and fortissimo were really like. My feeling is that all these performances were probably of the calibre of the very best I know. Petri is a bit more deliberate than Katchen in the E flat rhapsody (Brahms's last published piano composition though I'm convinced a very early work), but his handling of the melodic line in the section with the right-hand arpeggios is better than I ever heard before and he is absolutely in control over the notes in the final scrimmage. The two op79 rhapsodies are usually discussed as if they are similar in significance. I hear them otherwise - the B minor is a very fine composition indeed, but the G minor seems to me one of the most awesome masterpieces for piano in the entire 19th century, although you probably need to hear it done by Gould to realise fully what it amounts to. Hearing Petri as best I can, I doubt he equalled Gould in that, but I suspect he surpassed him - and Backhaus, and Katchen - in the B minor. I greatly like Petri's rhythmic sense. It is not generally similar to Serkin's, but there is the same feel of command and subtlety about it. Petri's Handel variations might have been a formidable rival to Serkin's in his Lugano recital (available on the Aura label) in that and every other respect if I could just hear the detail better. In the Paganini sets the recording is at its worst, sadly, and comparisons are just about impossible. The works obviously hold no technical terrors for him, and I doubt that he or anyone else ever equalled Michelangeli, but of course Petri gives us the works in full, not an edited compendium as offered by Michelangeli. There doesn't seem to be much by Petri in the current catalogues, so I'm happy to have this whatever the shortcomings in the sound. Horowitz and Michelangeli both complained that the younger generation of virtuosi are a bit assembly-line. I don't want to sound or feel some fogeyish 'laudator temporis acti' in saying that I simply have to agree. There is real, special and unique individuality here, and I don't hear a lot of that these days.
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