Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Piano Sonata No.2 in B flat minor Op35
Piano Sonata No.3 in B minor Op58
Nocturne in F sharp minor Op48 No.2
Barcarolle in F sharp major Op60
Rafał Blechacz (piano)
rec. 2021, Teldex Studio, Berlin, Germany
Reviewed as a digital download from a press preview
Deutsche Grammophon 4863438 [66]
Some artists, no matter how great, seem destined to fly under the radar. Even one of the very greatest of them all, Pierre Monteux, remains stubbornly under appreciated. On the face of it the Polish pianist Rafał Blechacz ought to have the world at his feet. He has a stupendous technique, buckets of charm, admirable musicality across a wide range of repertoire and tremendous energy and drive – not to mention the good looks seemingly needed these days to shift units. And yet he releases a Bach recording as good as that of his more celebrated label mate Vikingur Ólafsson and it is totally eclipsed by the Icelander’s recording. The same could be said of his astonishing 2008 recording of sonatas by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. It is not as if he is some sort of hermit like musician whose artistry is only accessible to the initiate – he tears through the Beethoven on that disc with thrilling charisma.
This is a mystery that I dearly hope this latest release resolves. Whether tackling two of the biggest beasts in the piano repertoire is courageous or foolhardy, it is most certainly a way of getting noticed.
As a diehard Cortot fanatic, I tend to find most straight Chopin a little undercharacterised but within the parameters of more conventional Chopin playing this new recording places Blechacz in the upmost echelon. What Blechacz is marvellous at is creating moments of rapt stillness- not something one would associate with the restless spirit of Cortot! The second subject of the B minor sonata’s first movement or the trio of B flat minor’s scherzo are just two such passages that immediately come to mind. Moreover, he achieves them without distorting the overall flow of the movement. If no one can ever match Cortot’s poetic transports, this doesn’t mean that Blechacz lacks lyricism just that his is of a more introverted type.
Of course, Blechacz can glitter and dazzle with the best of them in moments like the end of the B minor’s finale but the recital is anchored in quiet reflective musing as much as pyrotechnics. This helps enormously in the old war horse that is the Funeral March sonata. He sensibly doesn’t attempt to impose any kind of radical agenda on a score that has been played virtually to death. Instead, he sets about mining it for poetic gems – and largely succeeds. There is a refreshing lack of over earnest portentousness about the funeral march. It is nice to not be battered into submission in this movement or indeed by the work as a whole.
As a seasoned Chopin player – he won the 2005 Chopin piano competition after all – he knows how Chopin’s wide spanning melodies go and how to capture the fugitive, candle lit moods of something like the B flat minor’s opening. Perhaps this refusal to wow the gallery goes some way to explaining why he isn’t yet the superstar his pianism merits. That the two big pieces have quieter, more introspective epilogues in the form of a Nocturne and the Barcarolle is typical of his approach to Chopin. Even his torrential outpourings of notes in the big climaxes of the sonatas are at the service of the atmosphere of the composition. The B minor, in particular, is a surprisingly elusive piece mostly because it is driven too hard when it ends up sounding glib and empty. Blechacz woos it instead and what we get to hear is this sonata, as it were, from the inside. The best Chopin pianists – Rubinstein, Argerich, Friedman, Rachmaninov and so on – have the ability to get the listener to hang enthralled on the turn of a phrase as though time had paused. This is what Blechacz achieves time and again in, for example, the B minor’s slow movement. The same could be said of the F sharp minor Nocturne or the lyrical section of the funeral march itself and so on and on.
The Yellow Label has lately cornered the market in outstanding piano releases – in stunning sound it must be said – but I will make the same plea I made in concluding my recent review of Seong-Jin Cho’s superb recent Handel record – get these pianists into the studio more often!! In the meantime, this is a must have for piano fans.
David McDade
Previous review: Stephen Greenbank (April 2023)
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