Sergio Fiorentino - The Berlin Recordings [10CD Box Set] (2011)

This 10-disc box is Piano Classics’ most ambitious project to date, a tribute to a pianist who for many years was virtually ‘without portfolio’. Fiorentino shunned the ever-increasing necessity for promotion and publicity so that his glory was eclipsed by lesser, more commercially savvy pianists. His early recordings, where he was presented by the infamous William Barrington-Coupe (husband of Joyce Hatto) under a variety of names (Auguste du Maurier, Paul Procopolis, etc), were characterised by an immense but undisciplined facility, making the stature of these Berlin recordings, made at the end of Fiorentino’s life, all the more astonishing.

Wherever you turn you will encounter a human breadth and richness far removed from the often chilly aristocracy or froideur of Michelangeli and Pollini, his more celebrated compatriots. In Schubert you are reminded that, if for Keats ‘ripeness is all’, for Fiorentino naturalness is all. And, if he is arguably too benign or gemütlich in the Op 90 Impromptus (I am thinking of Paul Lewis’s recent disc – Harmonia Mundi, 2/12), he is memorably responsive to the A major Sonata, D664, to its ‘smiling lights and colours of a spring day’. He is no less superb in the A minor Sonata, D537, relishing its audacious and experimental nature.

Again, the sheer ease of his Chopin B minor Sonata leaves you lost in wonder: his Scherzo as ‘light as a hairbell’, his Largo rapt and communing. Then he is no less at home in heaven-storming Russian Romanticism, coming a close second to Boris Berezovsky’s long-deleted disc of Rachmaninov’s First Sonata. And if neither he nor anyone else compares with Van Cliburn’s magisterial rhetoric in his live Moscow recording of the Second Sonata (VAI DVD), his version is among the finest of those who sadly prefer the later and truncated 1931 revision.

Fiorentino’s Schumann Fantasie has all of his heartfelt eloquence (and what a fearless assault on the notorious skips at the close of the central march, the locus classicus of the wrong note). His way with the first of Liszt’s two Ballades makes a masterly case for what is outwardly one of the composer’s weaker works and his Sonata is among the finest on record, with the odd reinforced bass-line and emendation to suggest an endearingly old-fashioned affiliation. On the other hand, Fiorentino’s Bach is purer and less self-regarding than the often eccentric Gould and sometimes pedantic Rosalyn Tureck.

Finally, Fiorentino in Franck, where his unfaltering poise in the composer’s incense-laden notion of the ineffable contradicts Cortot’s mischievous reference to the ‘church-worker’ in Franck (‘le côte artisan d’église’). He makes nonsense, too, of James Gibb’s facetious assertion that in the Prelude, Aria and Finale, Franck’s sequences have ‘no more dramatic importance than the hitching up of one’s trousers’. Quietly sustained, luminous and intense, Fiorentino’s way with the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, in particular, is fervent and glowing, and it is somehow typical of his lack of virtuoso vanity that he resists a tumultuous rush to the finishing post at the close of the Fugue. The recordings are excellent and Piano Classics includes moving and affectionate tributes to one of the greatest pianists of the last century.