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Posted by Martin Walker on September 7, 2006, 11:07 am
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I tend to agree with the general view of many of Gieseking's later studio recordings implied by David Blomenberg's interesting review - but he was IMO at his best in earlier recordings, studio and especially live, from the 30s and 40s; apart from performances of Debussy and Rachmaninov I would particularly value his Schumann recordings from the later 40s made (I think) in the GDR: splashy at times, they are instinct with passion and ecstasy. As to his manner of practising: a long time ago I had a landlady in Ahrensburg (near Hamburg) who had taken lessons with the master - she and her husband were fervent admirers of Gieseking and played almost nothing but his recordings. She told me that Gieseking almost never practised at the piano, preferring to concentrate on reading the music with the utmost concentration, imagining fingering and all the other technical aspects of playing as emerging from the musical logic of the piece. He recommended his pupils to do the same. While this bore no exceptional fruit in Frau Günther's piano playing, at least to my inexperienced ears, she was an important musicologist who later became the editor of the Don Carlos manuscript discovered at the BN and now accepted as the preferred text of Verdi's great opera.
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