The Czech pianist Ivan Moravec, who has died at the age of 84, was one of the finest Chopin interpreters of his age. He took part in masterclasses given by the great Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli in Arezzo in 1957–58 and made his London debut in 1959, but his big breakthrough came with his American recordings, issued by the Connoisseur Society, of 1962. Two years later he appeared in New York with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, though his disagreements with the famously irascible conductor over the choice of piano and the interpretation of a Beethoven concerto meant that he did not appear again in New York for another four years.
Moravec was very much a player of the old school: eschewing the virtuoso warhorses, he had a calm, unruffled, almost phlegmatic posture at the keyboard, in part a matter of natural predisposition and in part the result of a youthful ice-skating injury that forced him to stop playing at the age of 18 when the symptoms recurred. They subsequently disappeared again, but as he himself noted: “Perhaps if I had been completely healthy, with muscles like a bull, my style would be absolutely different.” As it was, he developed a style of unaffected simplicity and a warm, rich sonority based on iridescent tone and precisely calibrated weighting, with generous pedalling: “Whenever I can combine sound to achieve tremendously long sonorities, I do it,” he said. His concern for tonal quality led him to carry a black leather satchel containing tools to remedy unbalanced keys or hammers.
Continue reading...