Alfred Cortot - Franck: Symphonic Variations (rec 1934) with concertos by Saint-Saens and Ravel

"One of his precious few concerto recordings, this disc shows Cortot at his most beguiling. Mark Obert-Thorn's transfers are exceptional and all lovers of past but ever-present greatness will want this second and final Naxos volume of Cortot's sadly few concerto recordings."
- Gramophone (Bryce Morrison) April 2001

"Yet more riches come our way from the historical scion of the ultra-budget-price Naxos label. Transfers on all these CDs do so much to eliminate the hiss and crackle (plus banishing the incessant four-minute side-turns) which bedeviled the listening of our ancestors (though they, little thinking anything better would come, accepted it all marvellingly).

"Here we can savour early recordings of quintessentially Gallic works for piano and orchestra with the great Alfred Cortot as soloist. Famed also as conductor (In 1902 he gave Paris its first Gotterdammerung), Cortot was a musician first and technician second; there are many splashes of wrong notes in these readings - as there are in most of the live performances we hear even today. What we relish instead of mere mechanical accuracy is a wonderful sensibility, a crispness of articulation and shapeliness of phrasing and a cultured, even witty, response to these pieces.

"Saint-Saens is represented by his Fourth Piano Concerto and his Etude in the Form of a Waltz, which provides a delicious encore. But historical interest is quickened by Cortot's gripping, all-of-a-piece account of the wonderful Symphonic Variations by Cesar Franck (ok so he was Belgian, but borders are allowed to overlap), recorded in October 1934 at EMI's new Abbey Road studios with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Landon Ronald; and even more so by his 1939 recording of Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand and Orchestra.

"Naxos' probing program note refers slyly to Cortot's blasphemous transcription for two hands of this carefully drawn work where Ravel gives so much thought to the relative balance of the thumb-dominated fingers on a single hand, and even wonders whether this recording might be featuring the use of this re-writing; I must say I, too, have my doubts, so rippling and fluent is much of the figuration.

"That question mark aside, we can remain impressed by Cortot's intellectual grasp of this imposing work, as well as by the freshness and vitality of the Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire, Paris under the splendid Charles Munch. ...Recording clarity is superb."

Rating: ****
- Birmingham Post Saturday December 9, 2000

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The Complete Musician:
Pianist. Conductor. Innovator. Champion of music of his time. Educator. Editor. Writer on music, musicians, and music appreciation. Collector of priceless manuscripts and first editions. Alfred-Denis Cortot was every one of those things, and as the nourishment of each of them contributed to the others, he became one of the most important musical figures and respected performers of the twentieth Century.

He was born, to a Swiss mother and French father, in Nyon, Switzerland on 26th September, 1877. The family moved to Paris when he was a small child, and after initial piano lessons from his sisters he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire where he studied first with Emil Descombes, one of Chopin's last pupils, then - more importantly - with Louis Diémer, one of the best-known French pianists of the time. Cortot took an auspicious first prize in piano in 1896, leading to performances of Beethoven concertos with both the Lamoureux and Colonne orchestras. He was, in fact, regarded as a Beethoven specialist at the time. One might speculate that his love of that composer's music, and especially the music of Wagner, was sparked by his association in those student years and at Bayreuth with Edouard Risler (some four years Cortot's senior, a Wagner and Beethoven specialist, with whom Cortot played Wagner opera at the piano in Risler transcription.) The Cortot's touring career was launched immediately, but his fascination with Wagner led him to study the composer's music with J. Kniese at Bayreuth during the summers of 1898 until 1901, during which time he was a repetiteur under conductors including Mottl and Richter. He had the Wagner operas memorised and could play through them at the piano. Back in Paris, he organized the Société des festivals lyriques specifically to conduct D and stage, at the age of 24 D the first Paris performance of Götterdämmerung (17th May, 1902). He also worked in both Paris and Lille in various concert sociétés (some of his own creation) over the next five years, leading the first Paris performance of Beethoven's Missa solemnis, Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem, and Liszt's St Elizabeth, as well as championing Wagner and conducting performances of published and unpublished music of contemporary French composers.

In the midst of this, in 1905 he organized, along with the violinist Jacques Thibaud and cellist Pablo Casals, one of the great trios of all time, one which - over its spasmodic years of collaboration and its still highly-regarded recordings - is credited with bringing chamber music to greater public cognizance and appreciation than it had enjoyed previously.

He taught at the Paris Conservatoire from 1907 to 1920, and in 1918 founded, with violinist Adolphe Mangeot, the Ecole Normale de musique, to this day one of the finest music schools in the world. He remained its director until his death. His annual summer courses in piano interpretation drew participants from all over the world, and his teaching was thorough, to say the least. His students had to give written analyses of works before them to better understand the musical personalities of their composers as well as the music at hand. Form had to be analyzed into what Cortot called a "geographical map" of each work so it could be played more intelligently, and he stressed freedom to express within firm structure, speaking of the "fruitful illusion which leads the interpreter to believe he is the composer of the work which needs his collaboration, and to mould its expression according to the mysterious secret of his inner dream". In 1928 he wrote Principes rationnels de la technique pianistique, considered one of the finest books on piano interpretation as it deals with virtually every technical problem a pianist can encounter. In somewhat "full circle", Cortot recorded the thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas in the last years of his life, recordings which remained unreleased more than 35 years after his death.

Cortot wrote three books on French piano music, the first two of which were especially effective in fostering a wider appreciation of composers including Debussy, Franck (on whose music Cortot was considered an expert), Fauré, Chabrier, Dukas, Saint-Saëns, d'Indy, Ravel, Florent Schmitt, and Déodat de S&3233;verac. There is also an important two-volume book from 1934 titled Cour d'interprétation which, though not "written" by Cortot, is a wide-ranging compilation by Jeanne Thieffry of "observations", as Cortot called them, from master classes he gave over several years. It contains highly-detailed comments about composers, their piano music, and quite specific aspects of both the techniques and spirit of its performance.

Cortot made more than eighty editions of piano music of various composers, most notably Schumann and Chopin, including the latter's Ballades, Preludes, and Etudes published in four volumes. As in his teaching, he included in these editions detailed suggestions for surmounting the technical difficulties in the music as well as writing about the music's character and extolling its worth. He also amassed a large collection of manuscripts and original editions.

And through all this, he was a tireless and internationally-acclaimed pianist, concertizing and recording, and these were activities for which he was at the time, and remains, best known.

He had been appointed High Commissioner of Fine Arts during the Vichy collaborationist government during World War II, and performed in Germany during that time. As a result, the postwar French government suspended him from public musical activity for a time in the l940s, but he continued to concertize and make recordings well into the 1950s. His last public performance was in 1958, his last master class came in 1961. He had basically retired in 1960 to Lausanne, where he died 15th June, 1962.

Norman Pellegrini