Rudolf FIrkusny epitomized an elusive but recognisable quality captured in a definition by his fellow Czech pianist, Ivan Moravec. For Moravec a musical ideal occurs when a natural instinct for poetry is combined with a flawless technique and pianistic sheen. A born aristocrat of the keyboard, Firkusny was too easily defined as above all elegant, a description that left too much unsaid; simultaneously accurate but limiting. Beneath the impeccable surface lay a fierce temperament that could, particularly in the early stages of his career, break out. His way with Smetana's C major Concert Study on a BBC recording is a virtuoso rampage and he was savagely stung by New York's waspish Virgil Thompson for violent excess in a 1944 Carnegie Hall recital. Clearly, there were many sides to a pianist generally considered from a one-sided view.
But here, in DG's magnificent reissue you hear Firkusny at his finest, most notably as a partner to such illustrious colleagues as Pierre Fournier and Erica Morini, and as an incomparable interpreter of Janacek. Reservations are few and far between. You could, for example, find his solo disc of Beethoven Sonatas cool to the point of detachment. In the first movement 'adagio' from opus 27 No 2 (so much more than 'moonlight') his fast-flowing tempo is a suave alternative to, say, Solomon's famous (for some infamous) near 'lento.' More positively, in the storming finale nothing is pushed, everything presented with an enviable clarity and ease yet with an inclusive sense of the music's agitation, leaving others to hector and insist. Again, all difficulties in the 'Waldstein' Sonata are resolved as if by magic, all possible strain and stress erased.
But it is in Janacek, in few more unsettling pages, that Firkusny achieves an unforgettable empathy. Here, in the manic climax of the two movement Sonata(composed in memory of the tragic and violent death of a student) he makes you hardly regret a missing third movement, lost when the composer attempted to destroy the manuscript. Firkusny finds all of the desolating bleakness and austerity of the Concertino, in the volleys of machine gun fire in the second movement 'prestissimo' and in the third and fourth movement's musical equivalent of a seizure. Again, in 'In the Mist' and 'On an Overgrown Pathway,' where innocence morphs into painful experience, Firkusny's response could hardly be more intense, more at the heart of the matter of such an emotionally fraught and powerfully idiosyncratic utterance.
FIrkusny could also be said to have owned the rarely played Dvorak Piano Concerto, rarely played because of its awkwardly unpianistic writing(Sviatoslav RIchter considered it the most difficult work he had ever played). Once more Firkusny's performance is of a rare command and finesse. There is a vivid sense of the pictorial in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and FIrkusny could hardly be more bright-eyed in Mozart's Nine Variations on a Minuet by Duport.
And yet the best is still to come in the chamber music offerings of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Franck. Here, surely, are dream partnerships, performances as it were of a single voice. In the Brahms Cello Sonatas Fournier and FIrkusny show themselves masters of understatement while at the same time achieving an ultimate eloquence. FIrkusny and Morini achieve a vision of rare quality beneath their impeccable surface in the Brahms D minor Violin Sonata, their Mozart is a marvel of dexterity and fine shading and they express all of Franck's torrid emotional life in his Violin Sonata. Their Beethoven lives and breathes with 'sprung rhythm', a whirl of virtuosity in the finale of the Sonata No 8 in G, radiant and affectionate in the glorious opening of No 5 in F, the 'Spring' Sonata.
If Firkusny, being human, had, like all other great pianists, his off-colour days they are surely erased by his unforgettable musicianship elsewhere. His legendary composure seems unsettled by Ravel('Jeux d'eau' and 'Alborada del gracioso') but he retains his truest form in 'La Vallee des cloches,' with its mysterious chiming of the Sacre Coeur. Elsewhere, the still centre at the heart of Schubert's B flat Sonata somehow eludes him; there are uncharacteristic touches of impatience.
Yet such clouding of excellence is momentary, and I can only react in wonder to one of the truly great pianists of the twentieth century. While richly comprehensive(and how grateful one is for the inclusion of those incomparable chamber music performances) there remains a wealth of material for a second issue. Firkusny's recordings of Brahms, Chopin, Schumann, Debussy and most of all Martinu and Smetana cry out for reissue.
Bryce Morrison