BBC Legends 3: Pianist Emil Gilels

The final installment in the latest BBC Legends series presents the last of the five pianists featured in the entire collection. Emil Gilels was born in Odessa, the same as Shura Cherkassky; and that city is also where Sviatoslav Richter spent the better part of his youth. However, shared geography definitely does not make for shared repertoire; and the Gilels album casts a much wider web than either of those other two pianists. Sadly, that breadth of content does not consistently make for depth of understanding.

The first half of the album was recorded at a recital at St John’s, Smith Square in London. This is a redundant church (no longer used for worship) that was converted into a concert hall in the Sixties, the first recital taking place on October 6, 1969. Gilels was recorded there on October 15, 1984. The recording coupled a selection of seven keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti with Claude Debussy’s Pour le piano three-movement suite. “Reflets dans l’eau,” from Debussy’s first Images book, served as an encore. The remainder of the album was recorded over a decade earlier at Congregational Memorial Hall (also in London) on April 22, 1957.

My own encounters with Gilels’ performances has not been particularly positive. I was first aware of him when I heard a performance of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major on the radio. The recording I had was one of my parents’ first long-playing purchases, featuring Rudolf Serkin as the concerto soloist. Even before the credits were announced at the end of the performance, I found the solo work to be unpleasantly ham-fisted. As a result, I was not surprised to come away from the Scarlatti and Debussy performances with a similar impression.

The Memorial Hall selections begin with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 90 sonata in E minor. There tended to be rather generous swings to extremes where both dynamics and tempo were concerned. In this case, however, I had no trouble accepting that Gilels’ “got” what the composer had in mind and could present those ideas to the attentive listener in a coherent way.

The remaining selections brought Gilels to “Russian territory.” Both Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Prokofiev were represented by early sonatas, Opus 30 in F-sharp major for the former and Opus 28 in A minor for the latter. These were separated by six of the twenty short pieces collected in Prokofiev’s Opus 22 under the title Visions fugitives.

I was definitely satisfied by the rhetorical stances that Gilels took for all of these Russian selections. On the other hand I have other sources for both the sonatas and the Opus 22 collection in its entirety. As a result, I doubt that I shall spend much time in the future with this final BBC Legends CD.