Greek-born but Paris-trained Cyprien Katsaris may well be the most dazzling and innovative of all living virtuosos. Having recorded for many labels (his way with the finale of Chopin’s Second Sonata is among the most wickedly provocative performances on record), he has since formed his label “Piano 21”, allowing him the freedom to pursue and explore a vast range of repertoire, much of it uncongenial to more commercially minded companies. And here, pride of place must go to four out of eight CDs devoted to Liszt. In the B minor Sonata, taken from a live 1973 recital, Katsaris is musically intrepid as he is technically blinding. Headstrong he may be but his performance blazes with passion and an elemental virtuosity that lesser pianists can only envy. He is as incense-laden as the most ardent Catholic could with in the “Benediction” and in all four Mephisto Waltzes (he resists Leslie Howard’s admirable completion to No 4), he shows a total empathy with Liszt’s satanic frolics. There are lavish embellishments in five of the Hungarian Rhapsodies that would surely have won Liszt’s plaudits and time and again Katsaris takes you out of a comfort zone to set your mind and senses reeling. His performance of the Second Concerto is the most spine-tingling on record and yet, even more remarkably, Katsaris is no less attuned to the dark-hued austerity of works such as Unstern!, Nuages gris and the hair-rising devilry at the heart of the Trauervorspiel und Trauermarsch (was Liszt, as once Blake considered Milton, of the devil’s party without knowing it, the reverse side of the religious coin?). Again, you are left in awe at the overflowing cornucopia of Katsaris’s gifts when you hear him in the Beethoven-Liszt symphony transcriptions (on independent label Piano Classics). For in music where Beethoven’s originals are unclouded by excess or extravagance, the playing is enough to have made even Horowitz wonder at such engulfing but taut and disciplined brilliance.
Liszt apart, there are further marvels in Katsaris’s Mozart, Schubert and, most entertainingly, in his DVD tour of Latin America, Live in Shanghai in 2007. Whether in Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, Cuba, Argentina or Mexico, he tells us, as in the subtitle of his concert, that “music knows no frontiers”. True, some of the music is of the Christmas-cracker variety, but when you turn to Villa-Lobos’s Alma Brasileira and most of all a Piazzolla selection, you are hearing music of genuine wit and sophistication. Katsaris’s romp through Ernesto Nazareth’s Odeon and verbal commentary and asides make you realise that he is, among so much else, a born cabaret artist. Amazingly, he has an innate understanding of music where there is no division between “serious” and “popular” idioms; a heady combination of café, folk, gaucho and Afro-American rhythm and melody.
In Viennese classics, Katsaris has less opportunity to flex a gypsy abandon that recalls his one-time mentor Georges Cziffra, yet he is never less than personal and engaging. I would not class his Mozart with, say, Kempff, Curzon or Perahia, who achieve a different subtlety, refinement and tonal chiaroscuro. Yet it is hard to resist his effervescence in the K382 Rondo or in his sampling of six cadenzas for K175 (four by Mozart, two by Katsaris). In Schubert’s Ländler, Katsaris is all charm and affection, and if he is more salonish than devotional in the B flat Sonata, he excels in three Schubert-Liszt transcriptions, where he confirms Liszt’s belief that Schubert was “the most poetic of all composers”.
All in all, these records, in all their infinite variety, are a testament to an endless range and brio. Cyprien Katsaris’s is a unique voice, serious, provocative, mischievous and compelling, a vivid and extraordinary example of recreative genius.
Gramophone (United Kingdom), March 2012
