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Emil Gilels - The Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon

A 24-CD box set to celebrate his 100th anniversary

In the recordings of Emil Gilels one can witness the evolutionary process at work, both on a large scale and, still more remarkably, within single performances. 

Gilels himself was acutely aware of this, often commenting that he never played a piece the same way twice. Nor was this just a question of technique and character. The musical ideas were different. Gilels was a born explorer. Every performance, however masterly, even titanic, was a hypothesis, part of an ever-changing vision. One view, not the view. 

As he early perceived, no single performance can reveal all the possibilities of any piece, from the slightest and shortest to the most epic and complex (Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata; the Brahms B flat Concerto). So great are the differences between his playing of one Beethoven sonata and another that it becomes a nonsense to talk (even to conceive) of “Gilels’s Beethoven”. Or Gilels’s anything else. 

His relation to any given work was akin to that between a portraitist and his subject. Each reflects the appearance and character of a unique individual (the work), captured at an equally unique point in time – a moment which will never recur. For all the overwhelming authority and vision of his most transcendent achievements, Gilels was a living refutation of preconception. 

His every performance was a fresh encounter. To preserve this cycle of endless rediscovery, he seldom kept a work in his active repertoire for very long before setting it aside to mellow and mature. As he told an interviewer: “When I’ve performed a piece three times, I think I’ve played it quite enough.

Dank aan originele poster