Lost Keys

I have no explanation for the current obscurity of pianist Richard Farrell.

by Peter Burwasser

The 1950s was a dangerous decade to be a classical musician. Piano great William Kapell died in an airplane crash in 1953, aged 31. The same fate took 36-year-old conductor Guido Cantelli, widely considered the successor to Arturo Toscanini, in '56. A high-speed car accident in '57 deprived the world of the magical horn playing of Dennis Brain, who was also 36. A new release from New Zealand now adds yet another name to the grisly list: pianist Richard Farrell, who was lost to us in '58 at the age of 31, also as a result of a car crash.

I have no explanation for the current obscurity of this artist. He was reasonably well-known in his day, clearly a major up-and-comer. No less than Arthur Rubinstein stated, in 1948, that there were but three great pianists in the world — himself, Kapell and Farrell. He must have had his tongue in his cheek just a bit, yet many a truth is said in jest. These recordings do, indeed, reveal a musician at the highest level. Farrell is a transitional pianist. He falls into the modern camp that evolved in the post-WWII years, when the OYAPs ("outstanding young American pianists") took the music world by storm with alert, smart and rhythmically crisp playing, and a self-effacing adherence to the letter of the score. You can hear this in Farrell's bold and joyous Chopin, and his gallant yet propulsive take on the Handel Variations of Brahms — as found on Volume 2: The Complete Recordings (Atoll), released last year.

Then, when he turns to the gentler music of Brahms, or the high Romanticism of Liszt, a different pianist emerges. The sound is like what you can hear on earlier 20th-century piano recordings, when the style of the day called for expressiveness at all costs, including the actual directions of the composer, all rendered in the richest possible tonality. Except without the pops and hiss. Farrell's Liszt, for example, is beyond sensual; it is downright sexy.

It is always a pleasure, in this age of cookie-cutter musicians, to discover a true original. Too bad in this case it happens to be someone who has been dead for more than half a century.

(p_burwasser@citypaper.net)