Reevaluating a pianist from the past

After decades of hiding in plain sight at the Curtis Institute of Music, pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski (1892-1993) suddenly became celebrated, in his final years, as a voice from a distant time. And he continues to be, though that voice turns out to be rather more than it once seemed.

Known primarily as an accompanist for the giants of his time (among them cellist Pablo Casals), the Polish-born Horszowski was also a noted soloist. But after emigrating to the United States in 1940, he was heard mostly in secondary venues, as documented in a just-released set, Chopin by Horszowski Through Text and Sound (Arbiter).

The double-CD set is packed with important, previously unpublished performances recorded between 1958 and 1991, in places as far-flung as Puerto Rico, Kansas City, and Rome. The pianos weren't always in tune. The sound quality is sometimes thin. But the recordings' value is in how they change the way one hears this great artist, an alternative view we might never have had were it not for his widow, Bice Horszowski Costa, and the nonprofit Arbiter label, founded and run by Allan Evans.

Mostly considered a miniaturist devoted to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, the younger, Europe-based Horszowski was no stranger to the grand manner, and he played Chopin as if the composer was family. Both composer and pianist were native Poles with concert careers begun at an early age. Both became such a part of the Parisian landscape that Horszowski's intimates believed he dreamed in French.

The few recorded echoes of Horszowski in that era - mainly a 1940 live recital recorded by Vatican Radio, literally rescued from the trash and published several years ago - give a startlingly different perspective on the pianist's supposedly demure temperament. He could, in fact, command a forceful sound, backed with brain power, the sort of intellectual examination that gave his playing an extra sense of imperative. When one is properly attuned to that, these qualities are easily discernable (if a bit filtered) in this new set, right up to the end of his life.

Horszowski's Chopin mazurka readings are usually hearty, bass-heavy, and full of gruff humor. His waltzes border on reckless. Nocturnes reflect existential rumination. He knew the value of expressive mystery in the Piano Sonata No. 2 and gave the funeral march movement an implacable sense of forward movement, minus cheap gothicism. Everywhere, there's a kind of freedom that comes not from observing the music but from embodying it so completely that interpretive decisions can't ring false.

Horszowski's fingers don't always cooperate. Though a 1976 Polonaise Fantasie is technically quite impressive, his opening entrance in the 1967 Piano Concerto No. 1 from San Juan has its clinkers. But in contrast to his sturdier 1952 studio recording of the concerto, the later Horszowski revealed more miniaturist details within the big flourishes.

Mozartean elegance is particularly evident in the jewel of the set, Chopin's Preludes Op. 28 from a 1973 New York concert. The often-fragmented preludes imply more than they say, and thus show a performer's psyche at its most naked. With the weight of the romantic tradition and a miniaturist's precision, Horszowski delivered fearlessly unguarded performances, every phrase opening up new avenues of meaning, even in preludes that go by in a blink.

Were that not enough, the booklet contains 17 pages of text drawn from Horszowski's copy of Edouard Ganche's Chopin: His Life and His Works, full of sentences he marked or underscored, dating to his years in Paris before World War I. In his disc notes, Evans writes that it's "as if Horszowski came back to silently guide us towards what had piqued his interest."

Let's not get too mystical, but it's certainly a window on how Chopin was viewed in that time. When Horszowski was a teenager, Chopin had only been gone 60 years - still present in living memory.