Piano Bravissimo

By Barry Hillenbrand/London

Tom Deacon, director of catalogue exploitation for Philips Music Group in Amsterdam, is one of those people blessed with the sort of memory for facts usually on display when 14-year-olds argue football trivia with their elders. Ask Deacon about a recording of a composition by a particular pianist, and he will rattle off all the details: the record label, the date and place of the recording, possibly even the precise microphone placement for the session. It's also likely that the recording will be in Deacon's personal collection of 25,000 LPs and 10,000 CDs. So when Philips decided to anthologize the work of this century's finest pianists, Deacon was a natural for the job of executive producer of the series.

After three years of sifting the great from the near great, Philips has just released the first set of 30 double CDs in its ambitious Great Pianists of the 20th Century series. When the last set is issued in August 1999, the compilation will total 250 hours of music on 200 discs--the largest CD edition ever released.

In agonized meetings, Deacon and a panel of experts whittled down a long list of pianists to the golden 74 included here. The selection will not please everyone. Partisans and critics already want to know why their favorites were passed over: "Where is Stephen Kovacevich's incomparable Schubert?" asked Hilary Finch of the London Times. But the reputations of the represented artists--Paderewski, Horowitz, Brendel--are indisputable. "Of course, this was a subjective and somewhat personal exercise," says Deacon. "I'm not arguing that some of those excluded aren't great. We are only saying the ones we selected are unquestionably great."

The pleasure of Great Pianists is in the listening, however, not in the debate over inclusiveness. All the significant performances of the century are here: Artur Schnabel's Beethoven, Wilhelm Kempff's Schumann, Sviatoslav Richter's Prokofiev, Walter Gieseking's Debussy. But Deacon was too knowledgeable, and too wily, to select only the gems that every piano lover may already have. More than a quarter of the music in the collection was previously unavailable on CD, and some pieces, such as Clifford Curzon playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27, have never before been released commercially in any format. Deacon scoured the archives--and his own collection--for rare and historic performances. He passed over Alexis Weissenberg's famed 1971 recording of Scriabin's Nocturne for the Left Hand, and hunted down the master of Weissenberg's obscure 1950 version of the piece, which, says Deacon, is "perhaps the most poised and beautiful recording ever made."

Deacon also had unprecedented cooperation in his search for the best performances. While Philips led the project, 24 other record companies contributed music to the edition. In fact, EMI, a fierce rival of Philips in the classical market, is represented on 55 of the 200 discs, while tracks from Philips feature on only 38. "The collection was so comprehensive and definitive that no label wanted its artists to be left out," says Chris Roberts, president of Polygram Classics, which owns Deutsche Grammophon.

And, of course, the boom years of the 1980s--when music lovers were replacing their LPs with CDs--are over. Classical sales have declined from 10% of the record market to about 5% now. To turn a penny, most record companies have halved their output of new classical recordings; instead, the buzz word in the business these days is compilations.

Great Pianists is unquestionably the compilation of all compilations, as well as a wonderful trip through the history of piano interpretation. Deacon has included performances of the same repertoire played by different artists to show the dramatic shifts in style and temperament through the century. The collection contains a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 during World War II. The performance is fanatical and wild--in sharp contrast to Van Cliburn's rendition, recorded after his famed competition win in Moscow in 1958, which is tender, lyrical and full of the charm that captivated the Russians. Similarly, Great Pianists traces the varying interpretations of Chopin through the century--from Ignaz Friedman (tempestuous, uncontrolled) to Artur Rubinstein (cool, modern and free of excess) to Claudio Arrau (full, rich, warm). Given enough time, this collection proves, styles have a way of coming full circle.

One might be tempted to dismiss this project as a glib summary of a century in boxed-set form--yet another cynical ploy by the record companies. But the 100 neat and tidy two-CD packets of the Great Pianists are a noble exception: truly great indeed.