Gyorgy Cziffra ‎– Cziffra Favourites

Cziffra, unlike Horowitz, took days off from being a showman. His Grieg concerto is not at all showy nor, I believe, is his Tchaikovsky, and nothing on these two discs of Chopin has anything like the flamboyance of his set of the studies. He is probably the most likeable super-virtuoso of them all, and there is a certain innocence about him (Horowitz is much ‘badder’). His lyric manner has an unaffected naturalness that propels some of his interpretations to the top of my preferences, there is a sense of sky and air about much of his playing that has the rest sounding laboured or contrived, and occasionally he is oddly low-key — the military polonaise ends in a slightly apologetic ‘er, that’s it’ way, and the two pieces in F# (the second impromptu and the Barcarolle) are definitely too restrained in my opinion. The F# impromptu is an odd and very original piece, and I liked Cziffra’s imaginative pedalling in the two little fanfare passages, but in the middle section the voltage is far too low. I’ll stick with Rubinstein for this and also with Rubinstein and Horowitz for the celestial Barcarolle, my own outright favourite of all Chopin’s works. Rubinstein’s urbane manner suits it very well, but he is not afraid to let himself go when the big tune surges out in all its magnificence. Cziffra, even more than Lipatti, seems overly concerned not to be virtuosic, and he even plays the entire opening phrase quietly, where my edition and every other performance I know has it starting loudly followed by a diminuendo. Horowitz has no such inhibitions of course, and his is my favourite version of all with his superlative double-trills, the thrilling way be blazes out into forte in the second section and the touch of suffused sparkle in the quiet right-hand runs just before the end.