Recommended Reviews

Benjamin Grosvenor’s Chopin is undoubtedly of the highest class, securely navigating as it does between temptations to understate or overstate. The first movement of the ‘Funeral March’ Sonata is properly agitato, without ever tipping into hysteria. Here and in the Scherzo second movement the most treacherous passages are clear and fluent, the lyrical contrasts sensitively yielding, yet not so much as to endanger organic flow. Grosvenor is not afraid to indulge in a little left-before-right desynchronisation, but only for the sake of expressive contrast, not least in structural repeats, and his textural voicing is always judicious. The Funeral March is severe without being inhumane, the Trio section daringly transparent yet also wonderfully sustained, with tastefully calculated agogic hesitations. The wind-over-the-graves finale is spectacularly light and clear, but never dogmatically so. Does this leave Chopin’s four ‘mad children’ (in Schumann’s unforgettable phrase) more sane than they might be? Perhaps. But if there is room for balance as well as extremes in Chopin interpretation, as there surely must be, then this is surely as fine a realisation as could reasonably be expected.

I could continue in this vein. But that would be to ignore the nagging doubt in my mind. Could the Berceuse not be a little more tender? While Grosvenor’s fluency and blend are nothing less than immaculate, for me his interpretation shades towards impersonality, never making me catch my breath at the wondrous beauty of the music.

Perhaps it is the sheer perfection of the pianism that makes me hanker for something more. And I recognise that my perception of severity may be another’s of subtlety. I know full well that to invoke Friedman’s famous recording of the E flat Nocturne – with each line as individualised as in a string quartet – is to make a comparison scarcely any pianist could hope to withstand. But with Grosvenor, by contrast, I cannot shake off the sense of a certain distance between the player and the music.

In the B minor Sonata, again, for all his peerless fluency, I wish he could cast care, along with the rehearsal studio, to the winds and let the music carry him and us away. The slow movement’s central section in particular is a little too ‘notey’, a little too severe of countenance, for my liking.

I want to avoid the cliché that this is more classical than romantic Chopin, because of its kind the playing is virtually flawless, and I have nothing but praise for the recorded sound. But there needs to be a reason – beyond admiration – to return to a recording, and with this one I am struggling to find it.