Par 1
PACHMANN was in good vein for his recital at the Brand Lane
Concerts, and played more finely than he has done here for
some years. It was mainly in his additional pieces that his greatest
skill was shown, and possibly it was his good fortune in coming off
so well in pieces of rapid execution that disposed him to extend his
recital so far. It is almost forty-two years since he first played in
Manchester at the Hallé Concerts, on January 3, 1884, when he
played Chopin's F minor Concerto, the Barcarolle, and other pieces.
Our own first recollection of him is at his second appearance a year
later, when he played Mozart's D minor Concerto as it has never
been played since, with an irresistible animation which seemed to
beam not only from the music but from his whole being. Never,
surely, did a player appear at the concerts who was so openly and
graciously delighted with himself. He ended with a performance
of Henselt's study 'Si oiseau j'étais', which made this piece the
most popular of all pianoforte pieces for many a long day, and
which still remains, in our own mind, as a performance that has
never been at all nearly approached. The notes seemed absolutely
to be borne up by the air and to have had no material being whatever.
Pachmann has always been unquestionably among the greatest
pianists in the world; yet hardly among the world's greatest
interpreters of music. He himself, in his moments of ecstasy, has
always pointed to his fingers as the secret of his magic; and there is
no need for the world to quarrel with the verdict. He has always
p.116
been one of the first purists of his instrument, and has been almost
first a lover of the pianoforte, and a lover of music afterwards. 'If
I played it like the rest I would not play at all,' he said of something
on Saturday, and it is in this extreme conscientiousness of the
exacting purist that he plays everything. He was opening out the
great C minor Fantasia of Mozart with an awe-inspired loveliness
of tone. 'Now listen to my left tumultuoso,' he exclaimed; but it was
no more than a capricious tumult that Pachmann made, and
one remembered how the great Rubinstein had thundered out
these left-hand tones from the very spot where Pachmann was now
playing. But Pachmann kept a Mozartean loveliness throughout,
and as the music is of such beauty that nothing better could be
chosen for the farewell to an instrument, one could be content to
be carried no farther than its liveliness carried one. The main part
of the Chopin pieces were small, but at the end there came the
B flat minor Scherzo, 'the best of all', as Pachmann put it, and
in this superb work Pachmann at once rose to greater heights.
As a feat of velocity and polished execution it was astonishing.
Careering along to the end of the working out, he cried, 'So-and-so
took it like this, and Liszt at this tempo.' One might venture to
think that Liszt would also have kept a fuller energy in the bass,
but Pachmann had made a splendid climax in one of the most
difficult of all Chopin's pieces.
Par 2
He began his encores with the little D flat Valse, indulging his
favourite ninths in the left hand, which are a fastidious addition
of which Chopin himself might have been proud. Then came a little
Barcarolle of Henselt, also with charming additions from his own
hand, and then the pianoforte was closed. Yet he came back after
a while and gave the little-played B major Nocturne. Then came
a dazzling performance of the 'Black Note' study with the middle
section given in a marvellous lyrical manner, and the final octaves
taken in contrary motion. It was this piece also, we think, which
he enriched in the harmonies by a superbly sustained ninth—a
real stroke of genius. Then he went back to the favourites of days
gone by—the E flat Rondo of Weber, which he played with marvellous
vigour and velocity. Could any other player in the world have
p.117
equalled this feat to-day? Not satisfied with this triumph he went
on to the 'Rigoletto' fantasia of Liszt, strewing the notes of the
cadenza passages around him with a true Oriental lavishness. One
began to forget his age, for he had worked himself into a sort of
youth once more, and his opulence and rapidity of execution
enabled one to sense the true Pachmann, the exhaustless genius of the
piano. We had almost forgotten what we thought was the greatest
musical feat of the recital. Few would associate Pachmann with
Brahms, yet it was in the composer's rugged 'Rhapsody' in B minor
that we found him wrestling, and that quite triumphantly, with
heroic ideas. He played the purist here, too, and we should not
have guessed, from the satisfying result, that Brahms was, as Liszt
said, the worst of all pianoforte writers.