I predicted, too, that this would be a great recording of the century: I am happy to stand by that! In June 1962, when the LP appeared, I felt it made an irresistible case for readmitting Chopin to the canon as a sonata writer and crediting him with a renewal of its dramatic force. There is edge, excitement and plenty of the Rubinstein temperament but no superfluous agitation, and in the opening Allegro maestoso, a movement which can often sound as if it's in two minds, the inevitability of events is a particular glory. Yet it's his brilliant conception and unfolding of each of the four – enabling detail to fall unhurriedly into place - that impresses most. The movements are realized with vibrant strength, intensity and expressiveness, and considerable risks are taken in the first and last. Without doubt it is one of his finest studio achievements. Having begun it in 1959 he didn't complete it until two years later, so one presumes it must have engaged him in a special way. At that stage of his career he was re-recording a good deal of Chopin for RCA but the version of the Sonata in B minor is the only one he made. In going back to my favourite Rubinstein records it is gratifying to find them as good as I first thought. Above all, he put the dignity back into Chopin playing. He conveyed the paramount importance of revealing the music's structural logic and the results were thrilling. When I began working for the BBC, recitals of Chopin were considered to be inappropriate material for the Third Programme but an exception might be made for him. Several lesser Chopin 'specialists' whom I heard in London in the early 1960s seemed to be in a time warp.īy the beginning of that decade Arthur Rubinstein was well established as the elder statesman of Chopin playing. Horowitz hotted up the ending of the B minor Scherzo by recasting the rushing-upward scale in Lisztian 'blind' octaves (you can hear this on his recording). Benno Moiseiwitsch played Chopin admirably but was accustomed to omit the first eight bars of the finale of the Sonata in B minor because he didn't like them. His revision of the E minor Piano Concerto includes re-orchestration and a wholesale rewriting of the solo part ('I am now more than ever convinced that Tausig's early death was the result of supernatural interposition for the extermination of a sacrilegious meddler' - George Bernard Shaw). Carl Tausig, the outstanding pupil of Liszt who was probably the first pianist to give all-Chopin recitals, could conceive of the Barcarolle only as a duet for two lovers in a gondola, with a kiss at bar 75. It has been said of him that no other body of work by a great composer has been subjected to such relentless performance. In the 90 years since electrical recording began there has also been little that has not been available on disc. In lands where people come together to listen to pianists, there has been little of his mature work that has not been constantly before the public. In the years since Chopin died perceptions of him have, of course, changed, as they do of all great composers, but here is a singular fact: his popularity has never waned.