For all his renown as a Debussy and Ravel exponent, Walter Gieseking commanded one of the widest repertoires of any pianist. Dating from the late 1940s and early ’50s, these Hessian Radio broadcasts encompass works Gieseking did not record commercially, save for Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata. The pianist brings a great deal of freedom and sensual sweep to Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Breathtakingly even passagework and subtle gradations of tone color compensate for Gieseking’s rather conservative dynamic range, but nothing the pianist does makes up for the Frankfurt Radio Symphony belatedly finding its form. Music and Arts’ richly detailed transfer appears to stem from a source superior to the one from which an earlier release on Pearl was based. Likewise, Gieseking’s 1947 Chopin A-flat Ballade sounds less noisy yet fuller in the present transfer compared to Pearl. The pianist stresses the music’s inner logic over its surface bravura, almost as if Chopin had turned into Mozart.
Gieseking’s vitality and assurance in Hindemith’s Four Temperaments is enough to overlook the orchestra’s scrawny strings and sour winds, and Schumann’s C major Fantasie reveals a daring, danger-seeking side to Gieseking’s artistry that rarely turns up on his studio recordings. Again, the Music and Arts transfer supercedes previous LP issues and at least one bygone Italian CD I was able to trace. While this 1947 Appassionata boasts better sound than the broadcast version of two years later included in Tahra’s Gieseking Beethoven Sonata cycle, it’s a shade hectic, facile, and casual compared to the pianist’s more carefully worked out (albeit no less speedy) commercial versions. All in all, this is a release that helps flesh out what we know of this important pianist.
