Piano Concerto Nos 3 & 4 (Rec 1956 & 1952)

Solomon (1902-1988; full name: Solomon Cutner) is among the most deeply revered of all pianists, a man whose career was tragically terminated by illness at the age of fifty-four, but whose serene and magisterial performances place him among the keyboard immortals.
Unlike his distinguished colleagues (notably Dame Myra Hess and Sir Clifford Curzon), Solomon was a child prodigy who survived his early success (at once painful and glittering) to become a mature artist. A protégé of Mathilde Verne (herself a pupil of Clara Schumann), he later studied with Lazare Levy whose students included such luminaries as Clara Haskil and Alexander Uninsky. Yet it is difficult not to equate Solomon with a wholly personal and idiosyncratic perfection, with years of unremitting focus and discipline, almost as if he was in quest of the Holy Grail. His way of fusing all the qualities, of making technique and musicianship inseparable considerations, was his own secret, and his eloquence was deeply admired by pianists as celebrated as Clifford Curzon, Artur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin and Gerald Moore, and by musicians as richly diverse as Sir Arthur Bliss (whose Piano Concerto was given its first performance by Solomon in New York in 1939), Dame Janet Baker and Eugene Ormandy
Solomon neither courted nor provoked controversy. Abram Chasins may have seen him as part of a "gracious assemblage that had long breathed the reposeful air of England" but, less quaintly, he also noticed Solomon's "proportionate grandeur that instead of seeming to lack power appeared not to desire it". Others, too, have confirmed Solomon's cardinal characteristics, his subordination of detail to the whole (his supreme architectural mastery) and his selfless concern with creator rather than re-creator, with composer rather than pianist. In this sense Solomon's 'matchless austerity', his capacity to allow 'all pianistic vanity to fall away', made him, like Dinu Lipatti, a true modernist. Many of his predecessors from the so-called Golden Age of Pianists often used a composer as a springboard for their own egotism and excess. For them the performer came first, the composer a poor second. With Solomon the reverse is true, and the results are both unadorned and transcendental.
In 1977 I was invited by Bryan Crimp (then of EMl) to write a tribute to accompany the reissue of Solomon's performances of 18 Beethoven piano sonatas. Later, in 1994, Bryan paid his own tribute in his book, Solo - The biography of Solomon, a sensitive and acute portrait of a great pianist cut down in his prime. Today, at the start of the millennium, it is warming and reassuring to find Solomon's Beethoven as luminous, masterly and selfless as ever. Indeed, his musical calibre seems doubly unassailable, a beacon of light in a world alive with every sort of meretriciousness or falsity; of 'spin' and 'P.R.' 'imagining' and the like.
Like Concertos 1 and 2 the Third Concerto opens Allegro con brio, but the difference and advance are immense. Here we enter what the novelist E.M .Forster once called Beethoven's C minor of life and, if the memory of Mozart's C minor Concerto K.491 remains strong, the music heralds a new and anguished dawn of Romanticism.
Others may be more thunderous and rhetorical but from Solomon the music's underlying drama is arguably increased rather than diminished by his pellucid tone and poetic restraint. Again, he makes you hang on every note while at the same time maintaining the music's continuity, and at the close of the the Largo he allows the music to sink down and come to rest with an ineffable sense of calm. Intriguingly he chooses Clara Schumann's cadenza for the first movement, a Romantic alterative to Beethoven's masterly original that underlines the music's fervour without overstepping its musical propriety (as in Alkans monstrous creation for the same Concerto).
How limpid and serene is his opening to the Fourth, always among the most poetic of all Concertos. Once more this is hardly the sort of performance where you stop to single out this or that detail, to marvel at the phrasing here or the colouration there. Instead everything is made to relate to everything else and only the music's glory is on show. The playing may be sobre but it is never dull and if Solomon this time chooses the grandest of Beethoven's cadenzas he plays it with an impeccable taste and reserve.
Few pianists have recreated Liszt's description of the Andante con moto as Orpheus taming the Furies. Indeed you could say that Solomon and Cluytens go a stage further and remind us of George Herbert's haunting poem, The Collar. 'But as I raved and grew more fierce and wilde/At every word,/Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child/And I replied, My Lord.' (The Poems of George Herbert: pp143-144, Oxford 1961). In the finale Solomon is joyous rather than rumbustious allowing ad libitum touches (as marked) for Beethoven's sudden virtuoso flourish and slight elaboration of the final cadenza. Once again we are given the whole music and nothing but the music.
Doubtless, were he still alive he would have disapproved of such comments, sensing an adulation alien to his essential nature. For him the re-creative artist seeks, however inadequately, to convey the composer's voice and hopefully, his character and essence. In such modesty lay his greatness. A pianist of the rarest skill, his warmth and humility shine through his serene and magisterial musicianship. To paraphrase some words by T.S. Eliot, from Solomon "the communication of the dead is tongued with a fire and assuagement beyond the language of the living."
© Bryce Morrison, 2000