Nelson Freire - Radio Days: The Concerto Broadcasts 1968-1979 (2014)

Nelson Freire's recent recordings for Decca have featured beautiful sound -- particularly beautiful piano sound -- and it was on the strength of these recordings that I ordered this one. Their real strength, though, was not the sound but the performances, and I realized that I couldn't expect the sound of these recordings of live performances for radio broadcast from between 1968 and 1979 to be as good as what Freire has been getting recently. And so it proved -- the sound is relatively unrefined, BUT both piano and orchestra are given good presence, and the performances are full of energy and gusto and, on the whole, really engaging and exciting. In my initial listening, I've been focusing on the big three -- the Firsts from Chopin and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov's Third. The last of these is the most recent (1979) and the sound is a bit better than that of the 1968 recordings, but there isn't much in it. David Zinman leads the Rotterdam Philharmonic (in the Concertgebouw), and the performance is very fine. Freire really digs in, and he can thunder as well as whisper, and it's as good a performance as any out there. Studio recordings -- like the excellent Byron Janis one -- can catch better the interplay of orchestral and piano textures, but although that degree of delicacy can't be caught by the older recordings, the solo winds and brass here get their chances to shine, and the effect is quite spectacular when Freire is playing at full stretch.

The big surprise on this 2-disc set for me was the Chopin. Heinz Wallberg sets a weight and a pace that defies the pianist to limit himself to filigree decoration. Freire meets the challenge and brings weight and passion that might seem a bit cruder than, say, Pollini's classic recording, or Rubinstein's, but it turns out that the music can take it. It doesn't come across, to me at least, as sounding overblown and rhetorical. Rather, it's exciting and alive, convincing me that it's better music than I thought it was. The Tchaikovsky, with Kurt Masur and the French ORTF Orchestra, is also terrific, very much in the Graffman class, with Freire playing with what seems like great authority. Masur manages beautifully the transitions from heroic and virtuostic to lyric, and in the third movement particularly, he gets all guns blazing and sets a pace that I initially thought was too fast -- until Freire showed that it didn't bother him in the least.

This is a 2-disc set for the price of one, and that makes it a better bargain than, say, the very fine BBC Legends series, where the sound is a bit less immediate in orchestral music. The other pieces not discussed here (I need to listen to them again) are the Liszt Second, the Prokofiev First, and the Schumann Concert Introduction and Allegro. My first impressions of them were very positive too, but I wanted to make a recommendation or not on the basis of the heavyweights. I'm happy to recommend them.