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It would be perfectly respectable, and considerate to readers, to give this disc a single paragraph of unstinting praise by way of a review. It ticks all the right boxes after all. In particular the main item in this Mendelssohn recital is a solo sonata that I guess is as unfamiliar to many experienced music lovers as it is to me. The other pieces are more mainstream, and all of them are given excellent performances, as you would expect from Perahia, professionally engineered to the standards of the mid-80’s. Perahia has a high reputation in general, but also notably high as an exponent of Mendelssohn. Any collector or enthusiast looking for a thoroughly reliable set of these works can go ahead and acquire it without needing further research, and a reviewer can, in all good conscience, leave the matter at that.
Do we want comparative rating of this recital with others? I can’t speak for other listeners as far as that is concerned, but there is no denying that long and elaborate record-review programmes are to be found on the BBC’s Radio 3 and its American equivalents, so someone must want them. Myself, I have no choice in the matter as I already own alternative versions of everything here except the sonata (although regrettably I can’t at the moment trace the other performance(s) in my collection of the Prelude and Fugue). Much as I admire Perahia, he is not some runaway hors de combat winner in quite as many respects as you may have been given to believe. In one respect I can even generalise and say that the left-hand fortissimo that he deploys is uncharacteristically powerful, and there is a danger that you might even think it plain old noisy, to the extent of being overdone in the context of Mendelssohn.
One Critics’ Choice that has also received hyperbolical praise, not unjustifiably either, is a rather more recent issue from Thibaudet, containing the Variations Serieuses and Rondo Capricciosos together with the two concertos. The more contemporary sound is bound to influence some hearers in Thibaudet’s favour, and in particular his scintillating fingerwork (try the right-hand thirds in the Rondo Capriccioso if you like) will be another attraction. I now see that my own review of that set was what I would now call over-strict and far too fault-finding, my listening having been conditioned by some golden oldies that have graced my collection for years, and that I may still be able to recommend as completely exceptional, even if I now forbear to make comparisons.
To be specific. Anyone who has not heard Horowitz do the Variations Serieuses has really missed something. The style is completely incorrect these days, but if that cuts you off from enjoyment of Horowitz here that is a real pity. There is a a deeper issue when we come to the Rondo, not least because in my own mind the Rondo is Mendelssohn’s very finest work for piano. My benchmark here is a performance that Rudolf Serkin gave to round off a recital in 1957 at Lugano. Serkin was at one time the recipient of a kind of total adulation that is given to different executants for a while, then to be silenced as the players in question are deemed to be out of fashion. His status now is what I recently heard described as an ‘anachronism’, but in his time he had a way of seeming to draw a line under the performance of many a work by the more conservatively ‘classical’ masters. The way that was once put to me was that Serkin says to us ‘You do it like this.’ I maintain to this day that Serkin’s sense of rhythm and timing was the finest I ever knew, and when another player, even as brilliant as Thibaudet, and Perahia slightly less, takes the same approach the minute subtlety of Serkin’s sense of rhythm and line has his rivals seeming a little more ordinary. Just to illustrate the matter, there is a winning performance by the ultimate super-virtuoso of them all, Cziffra, that treats this formidable warhorse of a work as just another Mendelssohn scherzo – ‘did someone say this was supposed to be difficult?’
Well, them’s my sentiments. If you feel you could have got anything worth getting out of this review from just the first paragraph, at least remember I warned you.
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