Claudio Arrau
(First Hand Records)
Three recitals given by the Chilean pianist in the 70s and 80s are a feast of lucid and emphatic playing that hasn’t dated in the slightest
T
hose of us who were lucky enough to attend piano recitals in London in the late 1970s and early 80s look back on it now as a golden age. Not only were the postwar generation that included Maurizio Pollini, Radu Lupu, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim and Murray Perahia at the height of their powers, and Martha Argerich was still giving solo recitals, but almost all of the greatest pianists of the second half of the 20th century – Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Annie Fischer, Rudolf Serkin – were more less regular visitors to the capital. And though since his death in 1991 his reputation and his considerable recorded legacy seem to have faded from view, Claudio Arrau unquestionably belonged among that senior elite, too, every one of his appearances, whether in concertos or recitals, eagerly anticipated.
