What more can anyone say at this point about the 12 Chopin Mazurkas Ignaz Friedman set down in 1930–incredible recordings all! Few pianists have imbued these works with such soaring, rustic abandon and epic intensity, achieved not so much by rubato (although there’s plenty of beat stretching going on) as through Friedman’s sense of timing and accentuation. He also soups up Chopin’s textures with filled-in fifths and occasional octave doublings, yet miraculously molds and balances the composer’s polyphonic web in the E-flat Nocturne Op. 55 No. 2 without amending the text. If you’ve never heard the latter performance, you’re in for a sublime experience: Friedman’s Chopin E-flat Nocturne is one of the four or five greatest piano recordings alive.
Friedman’s flying fingers laugh in the face of La Campanella’s taxing right-hand leaps and Busoni’s clotted amendations, and similarly dare Philippe Gaubert’s arthritic orchestra to keep apace in the Grieg Concerto. For all its bravura, the solo part’s inherent simplicity is quashed by Friedman’s headstrong, sometimes anarchic treatment, with its outsized crescendos and unwritten melodic embellishments. Opus Kura adheres to a non-interventionist transfer philosophy, and the results are noisier yet slightly fuller sounding than Ward Marston’s Friedman remasterings for Pearl and more recent reissues from Philips and APR. And some of Opus Kura’s source shellac discs sound noticeably worn (the A minor Mazurka Op. 68 No. 2, for instance). La Campanella’s gradual pitch drop (a flaw inherent in the original disc) is left uncorrected, while Bryan Crimp’s APR transfer solves this problem. The booklet contains brief, inept annotations in pidgin English preceded by several pages of Japanese commentary.
