Hailed by his peers as a keyboard perfectionist, Leopold Godowsky (1970-1938) supposedly played best in intimate settings but froze when it came to concerts and recording sessions. Granted, Godowsky abhorred the limitations of early recording techniques and went so far as to admonish a correspondent not to judge him by his records. Yet he did approve many items for release, consequently inviting critical judgement and direct comparison with contemporaries like Harold Bauer, Sergei Rachmaninov, Josef Lhevinne, and Josef Hofmann. Thus, the launch of Ward Marston's long-awaited complete Godowsky edition allows pianophiles to comprehensively assess the extent to which this pianist's recordings substantiate his reputation.

Like most Romantic pianists, Godowsky was not averse to amplifying the composers' texts. To my ears, his changes often miss rather than fortify the musical point. For example, he plays the final measures of Mendelssohn's Spinning Song in unison octaves, obliterating the composer's delicious effect of a single line trailing up and away. Knowing Godowsky's knack for clever harmonic embellishment by way of his transcriptions, I'm shocked that he omits the piquant E-flat at the end of Chopin's F major Prelude. By contrast, the radical cuts and abbreviations in Chopin's A-flat Polonaise and Liszt's Rigoletto Paraphrase reflect the record company's desire to shoehorn six-minute-plus works within the limitations of four-minute sides.

Yet even when he sticks closer to the text, Godowsky's quest for clarity and projection often yields pedestrian, rhythmically stiff results, like his clunky, impossibly square Chopin B-flat major Prelude. While the Chopin Berceuse boasts remarkable separation of voices in the right hand, it's ruined by Godowsky's wooden left-hand ostinato and leviathan ritards. I don't hear any nobility in his deliberately-paced Chopin A major Polonaise, but rather a heavy-handed, pedantic, and quite unmusical reading with more than a few smudged chords.

Of the two Chopin C-sharp minor Waltz performances, an earlier, unpublished take surpasses a charmless later version. Next to Josef Hofmann's aristocratically inflected acoustic recording of Rubinstein's Melody in F, Godowsky's perfunctory treatment places a distant second. Liszt's La Campanella and Gnomenreignen begin with stilted caution yet grow progressively riper in tone and scintillating in execution (the latter's left-hand repeated notes match the incisive drive of Rachmaninov's classic recording). Clean, fluid, and straightforward readings of Macdowell's Witches' Dance, Sinding's Rustle of Spring, Liszt's Un Sospiro, Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu, and Rachmaninov's C-sharp minor Prelude also display Godowsky at his best. As always with Marston releases, production values are beyond cavil, from session documentation and quality of transfers to Farhan Malik's insightful, fair, and accurate annotations.

--Jed Distler