Rudolf Serkin - J.S. Bach: Chromatic Fantasy, Italian Concerto (2002)

Not much of Serkin's Bach-playing has come down to us, sadly. During his lifetime it became unfashionable to play Bach in public on the piano. Tureck and others kept the tradition going, and of course it was revived in spectacular fashion by Gould. By now we seem to have got over the worst excesses of this particular cultural revolution, and my own attitude to the matter is and always has been that instruments are there for music and not the other way about. It all makes this disc a specially welcome reissue, and I would note in passing that the liner note is not strictly right in saying that none of the English or French suites from Serkin survive on record. In fact the 5th French suite is included in the disc that accompanies the fine 2003 biography of him.
In the Italian Concerto and Chromatic Fantasia I already owned performances by Gould and by Malcolm, the latter also giving us the fugue that normally accompanies the Fantasia. Making allowance for the obvious difference in the genius of a harpsichord from that of a concert grand, there is not a world of variety in the three artists' approaches. Malcolm takes the opening flourishes in the Fantasia faster than even two such piano-players would dare do on a resonant 8-foot grand, and he is rather more grandiose in the fugue than Serkin is. Serkin is a bit faster than the others in the first movement of the Italian Concerto, and in the last movement his speed is somewhere between Malcolm's fairly steady tempo and Gould's headlong and very exciting onrush. The slow movement, marked `andante', is my idea of adagio from all three of them. I am not scholar enough to offer an opinion on this - there is no mistaking what `andante' means in Handel, viz a definitely fastish tempo, but in Bach I'm not so sure and can only suppose that three such interpreters know what they're doing. The performance of the Capriccio on the Departure is from Puerto Rico in 1957, and intriguingly you can hear another performance by Serkin in Lugano in the same year, which comes as part of a hair-raisingly wonderful recital. That recital is incandescent, but it is not Serkin at his smoothest. This Puerto Rico performance has a crystalline aristocratic perfection, the touch in the Lugano reading is less even and there is a fluffed note somewhere, but the opening section of the Capriccio could bring tears to your eyes in a way he doesn't do this time. In the 5th Brandenburg the `marker' performance for me down the years has been from Menuhin and a Bath Festival group, with Malcolm taking the harpsichord solo. Serkin scales down his mighty touch to perfection, and if anyone equals or even surpasses Malcolm in the first movement cadenza it is Serkin. It appears to be taken in a single breath, but listen carefully - the rhythm seems so wonderfully straight precisely because it is not mechanically straight.
In the third millennium a record where the sound-quality is not top-class has to struggle for a fifth star, but I can't withold it from this record. It is not bad by any means, just not what we have come to expect nowadays. I recalled the account of how Serkin got his first opportunity, playing Bach to the Busch family. Adolf Busch exclaimed excitedly to the others `The way the boy plays you can see the whole score in front of you'. Just so. There is one slightly sad little extra here, the aria from the Goldberg variations, all that survives of a work Serkin was associated with all his life and that he was still practising on the counterpane of his deathbed. It is played at a dead-slow tempo as it ought to be, and I experienced a great wish to hear it again at the end of the record, rounding it off as Bach used it to round off his variations. I am in no doubt at all that Serkin would have disapproved of any such sentimental proceeding, but the advantage of cd technology is that I can do this if I want and nobody has to know.