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Brahms - Piano Sonata No. 3, Paganini Variations, selected Intermezzos and Rhapsodies - Earl Wild    

It’s funny how Brahms’ youthful, big-boned F minor sonata often proves to be a youth tonic for veteran pianists, who gleefully brave the work’s considerable challenges and survive miraculously unscathed. Harold Bauer’s recording is a good example, as is Etelka Freund’s; and then there’s the 72-year-old Arthur Rubinstein’s classic stereo version. At 86, Earl Wild may be the oldest pianist to have recorded this gnarly opus, but damned if he doesn’t sound like an unbridled young virtuoso. He digs into the opening movement’s massive chords and dauntingly unidiomatic octave passages with a kind of galvanizing assurance that makes his 50-something counterparts on disc–such as Daniel Barenboim and Vladimir Ashkenazy–sound arthritic by comparison.
In his program notes, Wild cautions those who tend to drag the sublime Andante, favoring a two-beats-to-the-bar conception as opposed to, say, Claudio Arrau’s expansive four beat approach. Yet Wild himself takes plenty of time to savor lyrical niceties. He eases into the Scherzo’s opening flourish and quickly slams on the accelerator: there’s no place for repose in such a demonic reading. If the Finale is not as incisive and dynamically varied as it might have been, notice the care with which Wild organizes the bass lines, or his intelligent melodic parsing of the rolled left hand chords in the coda.
The short pieces prove no less absorbing or (for the most part) convincing. To my ears, however, Wild’s Chopin-esque rubatos in the B-flat minor Intermezzo slightly detract from the music’s classical restraint. By contrast, his rapid, forceful dispatch of the C major “Myra Hess” Intermezzo (Op. 119 No. 3) lacks grace and lilt. A live 1982 performance of Brahms’ Paganini Variations finds Wild on more inspired and communicative form than his admirable though relatively straightlaced 1967 Vanguard studio recording, and his 66-year-old fingers prove more than up to the task. Invariably, the sonics change from venue to venue (a church in Buffalo, the Salle Gaveau in Paris, and of course, Wild’s Columbus, Ohio home studio), but not distractingly so. How many other pianists remain at the top of their game in their late 80s and continue to evolve as artists and musicians while remaining true to themselves? A remarkable disc.