Edwin Fischer playing Beethoven

Edwin Fischer playing Beethoven

Edwin Fischer is one of those elusive pianists whose despairingly few recordings show that on his day he was a peerless poet, and the seemingly the least self-conscious or self-interested of pianists. His mistakes are not taken away with countless takes or carefully tailored phrasing, and signs of strain sometimes show through without diminishing the impact of his view of the sweeping vistas he always uncovers in the music.

His Mozart recordings are all treasurable. Uniquely, and seemingly artless in their complete characterisation of the music. Often they find more open lightness in the music than others, though it is always tinted with the sense that there is some deep sorrow inherent in the music. Very strange mixture, and how is it so convincingly conveyed? If I could answer that question then I would not be posing the question!

Not all that many pianists are equally convincing in Beethoven and Mozart. Fischer is an exception. He fully understood the different rhetorical and expressive worlds these two giants occupied musically. His Bach is perhaps the most satisfying performed on the piano as well, and his efforts in Schubert and Brahms indeed show a comprehensive range of understanding in style and heart! What he chose to perform he performed always at the highest level, though his repertoire was actually all-embracing. He could play the Rite Of Spring at the piano entirely convincingly for pupils though never in public! And played all the new music of his day in his earlier career, when he had a cast iron technique to match his musical vision. Eventually he withdrew from concert giving for health reasons, longer before he died.

But there are three recordings of Fischer which rank among my favourites, and all three still out nearly sixty years after being recorded.

The pairing of the Third Piano Concerto in C Minor and the Fourth in G recorded the same week in 1953 with the Philharmonia - on Testament - somehow have a magic balance of the clear-sighted honesty and the completely poetic, which is beyond analysis. He never was an enthusiastic recording artist, and sometimes things did not go well. But here he seems to have relaxed to the task, so much so that the results both sound like concert performances, and yet have almost no slips!

The best of all perhaps, though the music does not allow for much poetry [in other hands!], is the Emperor Concerto, which was recorded a couple of years earlier with the Philharmonia under Wilhelm Furtwangler. Here Fischer entirely engages with the extra-ordinary energy of the first movement without ever making it hard toned or over-driven though his tempi are decidedly brisk! Furtwangler admired Fischer the musician, and the two had been friends for a good thirty years, and for once Furtwangler provides as guileless a rendering of the orchestral part as Fischer demands in his way with the solo. It is fascinating to listen to Furtwangler abandon his own high-flown - often exaggerated - way with Beethoven, and fine it down to a remarkably selfless and energetic adoption of Fischer's seemingly more natural and simpler way. I say seeming as the way Fischer works is with a tremendous flexibility of phrase, rather than broad swings in the basic tempo! It is actually very subtle, and lithe.

The masterstroke in this performance, however is the slow movement, where if ever Beethoven exalts in his music it is here. Fischer almost seems to integrate his tone entirely into the accompaniment of the sounds of the orchestra, so that when the Finale arrives the piano flourish that launches the new music takes on a joy unsurpassed in any recording of the work I know. This launch is managed without fireworks, but merely an expressive change of colour from the piano, something Fischer was a master at and it remains impossible to entirely explain.

Whatever other recordings you have of these works, please consider adding these, for the sort of insight never likely to be repeated on records, simply because that un-self-conscious style of performance where details [largely] take care of themselves, and the swing of the music is all, has gone completely from the modern style of technically perfect performance, fashionable today.

The Emperor Concerto is out on EMI References [historical] CD currently.

ATB from George