In a way there doesn't seem to be that much to connect the piano as invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700 and the gleaming black half-ton of wood, metal and felt that is the modern concert grand. The keys, hammers and strings are still there, but the detail of the mechanism, the feel to the performer and the sound have all changed.
Yet despite the changes it has undergone, its position is unchanged as the most viable of one-person orchestras and has been secure for hundreds of years now. And even in the field of popular music, the electronic keyboard has yet fully to supplant an instrument which, in the form we know it, is still a triumph of 19th-century industrial techniques. Think of Elton John at Princess Diana's funeral service.
And have you noticed how the piano - a grand, naturally - still surfaces in the apartments shown in movies and TV serials as a symbol of affluence and culture? Just as surely as the symbolic Hollywood computer is likely to be a Macintosh, the symbolic musical instrument is still the piano.
The piano's social history is that of the domestic instrument par excellence. You don't have to put it in your mouth. You don't have to know how to tune it - someone else does that. And just a single movement of the finger produces a sound. Not even the guitar can rival such simplicity. The fact, then, that the piano is such an easy instrument to imagine playing has always been one of the ingredients of its popularity (and beginners' practice causes much less pain to innocent bystanders, than on, say, the violin, or the recorder). The piano's popularity was so great earlier in this century, that the sheet music of popular songs sold by the millions.
The piano recital as we know it, like the modern-day instrument itself, is a 19th-century development. Liszt was the figure who first proved that a single man at a keyboard (and it usually was a man) could keep an audience happy for a full evening without the benefit of supporting artists. And he was aided in his one-man shows by the practice, initiated by one Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) of playing with the instrument side-on to the audience, so that listeners could see the player in profile. No small advantage, this, if you had the personality and profile of a Liszt. Another key development of the 19th century was the confrontational concerto, a mock-gladiatorial encounter between patently unequal forces, a testing ground of individual strength and stamina in which the lone keyboard David could always be expected to triumph against the collective orchestral Goliath.
The 19th-century conceptions of recital and concert are at the heart of Philips's recently-completed, mammoth issue of 100 two-CD sets of great pianists of the 20th century. The choice of musical fare is concentrated on solo and concerto repertoire. The field of chamber music or partnership in song recital is left completely unexplored. And the illusion of absolute mastery - a 20th-century phenomenon born of the recording studio - is perpetuated through the predominance of studio rather than live recordings. (Wisely, that most unreliable of sources, the piano roll, has been left entirely out of the reckoning.)
Although heavily tilted towards the eras of the LP and CD, the range of the Philips series is wide. Some of the oldest players included had careers which were launched in the 19th century. The oldest is Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), possibly the greatest household name among pianists in the 20th century, who was, for a time, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the newly-independent Poland of 1919 - Paderewski was one of the signatories to the Treaty of Versailles. He was far from being the most lavishly endowed of pianists or musicians, but the charisma of his playing and personality carried all before it.
That, of course, is the stereotypical image of the great pianists of the romantic age - big personalities, phenomenal technique (usually), a blind eye to scholarship and musicology as they impinge on performance, and questionable taste in the exercise of interpretative licence. The freedoms that the stereotype attempts to cover are, of course, by no means unknown in players still performing today. And what we tend to see as latter-day concerns with textual fidelity and more objective musical perspectives were by no means unknown in earlier days. There's the case of Leopold Godowsky (18701938). In his lifetime, he was a player more highly-regarded by his peers than any other.
Apparently, he only delivered of his best off the concert platform, in the convivial company of friends. Yet in spite of his reputation as an arch-romantic, Godowsky recorded in 1929 a performance of Beethoven's Les adieux Sonata, which is remarkably "classical" for its time.
Romanticism, if you want it, can be had in the glorious, richtoned Chopin of Ignaz Friedman (1882-1948). Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) took interpretative licence to dramatic extremes - he tended to play everything as if he'd composed it himself. And he did it with inimitable ease, as if the piano were an extension of himself, imposing no perceptible limitations on how he wanted to express himself. Two fellow Russians, Josef Lhevinne (1874-1944) and Evgeny Kissin (born 1971), and the Polish-born Josef Hofmann (1876-1957), share with Rachmaninov the rare feeling that technical barriers are simply not an issue when they sit at the keyboard. The piano recital of the early 20th century was well larded with display pieces, light (for the audience!), charming, even frivolous. And the tradition of including arrangements in concert programmes was also well established, though even then, it doesn't seem to have reached the crisis proportions found in guitar recitals today. The earlier players included in the Philips series tend to be represented by shorter and lighter works; in the days of 78s, when the playing time was up to about four minutes per side, even a short sonata was likely to take up more than a single disc. And this made the record companies worry about sales. The Philips series is relatively generous in representing latter-day accounts of these arrangements and bon-bons, and one of the masters of the genre, Earl Wild (born 1915), is represented by a selection in which not a single composer's work goes unmodified by a second hand.
The art of bringing fresh perspectives to works not far removed from the salon is far from dead: witness the unprettified, firm-spined playing of some of Grieg's Lyric Pieces by Zoltan Kocsis (born 1952). And, at the other end of the scale, you'll find some strange perspectives in the fun-fair ride that Gyorgy Cziffra (1921-94) made through the Chopin studies - a strange choice to represent a player whose reputation rests mainly on his Liszt. The flighty, mercurial Frenchman Samson Francois (1924-70), is another player who can be eccentric to a point. His playing may be rarely balanced or sober, but he's now a cult figure in his native France.
John Ogdon (1937-89) was another man whose playing varied widely, particularly at the end of his life. The early recordings come across as the fascinating work of an intellectual driven by strange demons. Not everything in the Philips selections is as you might expect it. Shura Cherkassky (1911-95), one of the romantics of our own day, quite simply - and very surprisingly - didn't muster the raw technique for Chopin's Studies in the 1950s; he sounds consistently better in the later recordings here. The little-known, intimately-scaled Brahms recordings from the 1950s in the first of the three volumes covering Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) are a consistently rewarding surprise.
One of the easiest things to learn from this survey is the difficulty of extracting generalities. Among present-day players, there's the firebrand temperament of Martha Argerich (born 1941), more a pianistic than a musical thrill. Radu Lupu (born 1945) favours a style that's altogether more magisterial, though sometimes remote. Maurizio Pollini (born 1942) is never less than intellectually commanding - someone once joked about him playing as if he wished he could play a wrong note, as a sort of signal that there was a softer, more vulnerable side to his make-up. Krystian Zimerman (born 1956), is a sensitively musical control freak, with the technical wherewithal to deliver to his own satisfaction.
Among British pianists born around the turn of the century are Solomon (1902-88) and Myra Hess (1890-1965). Solomon (so named as a child prodigy) handles virtually everything with aristocratic poise and polish; occasional flashes of fire break through his veneer of emotional reticence. Hess was a strangely commanding figure, and a major force in Britain where she was a household name for instigating a concert series in the National Gallery during the second World War. Slightly younger was the Schnabel pupil, Clifford Curzon (1907-82), who married intellectual probity with a self-effacing yet emotionally persuasive reserve. From Russia and Eastern Europe came Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963), who settled in England and won a wide following for a style of honeyed caresses. Later, in the years of the cold war, two titans emerged from the Soviet Union; Emil Gilels (1916-85), a sometimes fiery, sometimes gentle keyboard giant, and Sviatoslav Richter (1915-97), a mesmerising, unpredictable visionary, showing uncommon architectural grandeur in Beethoven, yet capturing to perfection the fluctuating romantic pulses of composers like Schumann, Rachmaninov and Scriabin. The altogether less well known Czech player Ivan Moravec (born 1930), is a seductive cultivator of svelte, cushioned tone, in an individual style which doesn't quite escape mannerism.
From the other side of the Atlantic came two players whose names are intimately associated with the music of Bach; Rosalyn Tureck (born 1914), whose playing here, in recordings from the 1950s, is awesomely reverential, and Glenn Gould (1932-82), often wayward, ever-provocative, reclusively self-obsessed, and, like Tureck, with a repertoire that extended far wider than just the music of Bach. And William Kapell (1922-53) and Byron Janis (1928) are two major but little-known American figures of the mid-century - Kapell died in an air-crash before the age of 30, Janis had his activity curtailed by arthritis.
I haven't had space here to mention all 70-plus players covered in the 100 sets of the Philips series, which are all double CD sets priced as a single disc. The earliest batches - they can be bought at a discount, 10 sets to a box - were covered on this page in September last year, including some well-known names not mentioned here a second time. The documentation, it has to be said, is not all first-rate. Information about recording dates is not always complete. The accompanying essays are variable, though those by Piero Rattalino are particularly fine and well worth seeking out for their own sake, even when you disagree with his conclusions (some of the others descend into the incoherent cart-before-horse conclusions of fanzines.) And there's probably no single individual who, given the freedom of choice, would have plumped for the same performers and repertoire as did the series planner, Tom Deacon (Andre Previn a "great pianist" - he must be joking!). But as an enterprise to celebrate the music and musicians of the piano, there's really nothing else quite like it. Maybe we can now look forward to some sort of supplement (as in EMI's Record of Singing) to catch some of the figures missed out first time round. My first votes would go for the pianist/composers of the early years of the century, and for those selfless toilers - completely unacknowledged by Philips - who have chosen to take seriously the major music of the second half of the 20th century. That could be a project for the next century. Next week.
Sleeve Notes returns next week.
