As the days inched toward the date of his next recital in the French city of Besançon on September 16, 1950, Dinu Lipatti became concerned. The Hodgkin’s lymphoma which had plagued him for the last several years had recently tightened its grip inexorably and irreversibly. While he rehearsed the morning before the concert, his body appeared willing to grant him respite. By that same afternoon, however, his condition suffered such an acute reversal that his doctor pleaded with him to abandon the recital. It was only upon hearing that Besançon’s Salle du Parlement, the site of the imminent concert, was packed to capacity that Lipatti finally decided to defy his state of health and appear as scheduled.

The recital itself, mercifully documented for posterity, remains a potent record not only of Lipatti’s especial genius, but of the remarkable reserves of personal will which allowed him, momentarily, to transcend the limitations of his body. More astonishing still is that the artistry which he displayed on this, his final concert, save for the sting of a couple missed notes betrayed nothing of the debilitating pain which had made an agony of his life in 1950. Even his impromptu omission of the final Chopin waltz from that night’s program seems curiously appropriate; an intimation of the tragic incompleteness of a life that would be cut short only three months later.

Decades after his passing, his legacy continues to serve as a beacon for succeeding generations of pianists; the most famous of his recordings practically definitive. How to hear the Chopin Waltzes, the Bach/Hess Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, or Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso without first setting aside the memory of Lipatti’s crystalline sonority and silverpoint phrasing?

Lipatti’s final recital has become the stuff of legends among pianophiles, a document listened to and studied over and over again. Yet a new restoration of this Besançon recital vividly demonstrates just how much of his artistry had been buried in previous reissues.

The new reissue of this concert by the French label FY Solstice distinguishes itself from previous ones by virtue of its unmatched richness and depth of sound. Indeed the sheer presence of Lipatti’s sound on these INA tapes exhibit a physicality, a sense of being heard in the present tense that is nothing short of revelatory.

Earlier this month, Yvonne Carbou, co-founder of FY Solstice and producer of this reissue, and Mark Ainley, internationally recognized scholar of historical piano performance and of Lipatti’s art in particular, agreed to be interviewed about a pianist whose legacy continues to glow incandescent, and whose final recital is one of the great treasures of recorded music.

Néstor Castiglione: Your label’s latest disc is new, but consists of a recording well-known and beloved to pianophiles around the world. How does your release stand apart from prior reissues?

Yvonne Carbou: As you know, there have been several issues of this famous recital, not only by EMI, which was the label for which Lipatti was an exclusive artist. The complete duration of the recital goes quite beyond a normal duration of a LP, the format on which this concert was originally made commercially available.

Mark Ainley: This is the first edition since the original commercial release of the recording in 1957 to go back to the original broadcast tape. All reissues prior to the Solstice edition have used EMI's copy of the tape or LP transfers of the original release. Missing from those releases were Lipatti's warm-up “preluding” to the Schubert and Chopin portions of the program, although the first LPs including the warm-ups prior to the Bach and Mozart works. It is unclear to me why they did not present the other “preluding.” Also never previously released were the complete radio announcements, so present-day listeners can now at last experience what it had been like to hear the broadcast on the radio in 1950.

One other interesting difference is that the original Radiodiffusion Française (RTF) tape had several bars from the Schubert Impromptu in G-flat, Op. 90 (D. 899), no. 3 cut out. Just a few years ago an unedited transcription disc of this performance was discovered which revealed that Lipatti played a wrong note in the concert. Radio producers likely wanted to edit this out of the broadcast (the pianist and his wife certainly may have had a say in this), and for the original LPs, the performance was carefully edited to present the entire work without the wrong note. Now we can for the first time hear it exactly as Lipatti played it at that fateful final recital in Besançon.

And of course, there is the sound quality, which is vastly superior to any other release, as well as the comprehensive text in the booklet, which includes some very moving photos of the recital, some of which have never before been published.

N. C.: Let us return for a moment to Lipatti’s “preluding.” What function did it serve for pianists? How common was its use during this period?

M. A.: Lipatti's preluding certainly caught the attention of listeners when the set was first released in 1957 and ever since has been the subject of discussion, as the practice had largely disappeared by then. It was quite common in earlier eras, particularly amongst Romantic pianists. Every solo broadcast recording of Josef Hofmann finds the pianist touching the piano and playing a chord or two, but it had become less common with pianists of Lipatti's generation. The last of the well-known pianists I'm aware of to have engaged in the practice was Wilhelm Backhaus, who in fact gave two-piano concerto performances with Lipatti. We can hear him preluding at his own final recital in 1969. Jorge Bolet's pupil Ira Levin still engages in the practice today, though he is the only one I know who does. It was a practice that allowed the performer to have contact with the piano before beginning their performance, which can certainly serve to calm nerves and re-familiarize themselves with the touch of the instrument; and many—as did Lipatti in this Besançon concert—would modulate from the key of the previous piece to that of the next work.

N. C.: What were the state of the materials that were used for EMI’s issue of this recital?

Y. C.: They would have had the RTF tape at that time. It also seems that they had access to Madeleine Lipatti's own transcription disc of the Schubert Impromptu, in order to effect the skillful edit that fills in missing section from the broadcast together with a section from later in the composition.

People knew for a long time that these tapes existed at the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA). Important musical events were systematically recorded by the RTF during the 1950s. This recital would have been considered especially important as it took place in the Salle du Parlement in Besançon, a government building. At this time, sound engineers used to record directly onto acetate discs, not tape. If the concert was supposed to be broadcast, as was the case with Lipatti’s Besançon recital, they had to make tape copies.

What is more surprising to me is that when the compact disc appeared in the 1980s, no one had thought to make a new edition of this recital. Because by then the duration of the playing format could have permitted to include almost the whole concert. Why did nobody take this opportunity before? I don’t know. It seems to me that most other labels, including EMI, preferred to keep only the musical pieces.

N. C.: The sound quality on this reissue is indeed superior to all previous editions I have heard of this recital.

Y. C.: The INA tapes were rather well-preserved, but our technicians still had to remaster the sound.

M. A.: I can state that a number of old broadcast recordings do indeed have wonderful sound thanks to the great technology now available for transferring them, although in some cases there has been deterioration due to age. We must certainly commend Christophe Hénault of Studio Art & Son for his stupendous restoration work on this release.

N. C.: Rumors have been rife for decades of additional Lipatti materials locked in the vaults of private collectors. Are further discoveries of hitherto unheard recordings by him possible?

M. A: There most certainly is that possibility because, in fact, in 2018 some never-before-heard Lipatti recordings were released, ten years after I first encountered them in a private collection. They were released on the Marston label last year and reveal a completely different side to Lipatti's artistry. The RTF transcription disc that helped us present the Schubert G-Flat Impromptu complete for the first time was actually located in 2015. So indeed Lipatti discoveries are still taking place, and many historical recordings never known to exist are being found from even earlier periods. So let us hope that we will at last be able to locate Lipatti's “Waldstein” Sonata, which he broadcast several times, and his Ravel Piano Concerto in G.

N. C.: Nearly 70 years after his death, Lipatti continues to capture the imagination of musicians and listeners across the globe. What do you believe accounts for this?

Y. C.: I think Lipatti’s tragic death at the age of 33, at the height of his fame, marked without any doubt the beginning of his legend. He was physically a Romantic; everybody was moved by his kindness and his profound gaze. He was a marvellous pianist with a career of great promise ahead of him, so his brutal and unjust death was an intense shock for the whole musical world. Lipatti had an extraordinary nobility of spirit and remained humble in the face of music.

M. A.: Lipatti was an example of extraordinary devotion to his craft and to the wider landscape of music. When he played, he was not just playing that work, or serving the composer, or the piano, but rather serving all of music. There is something so universally appealing about his fusion of skill, intellect, heart, and wholesome intent. We hear each voice as if it were a different instrument, yet everything is balanced within the context of the whole. His playing seems to be a metaphor for life, in which many things work together to create and serve something greater, and how he does this is infused with such beauty and simplicity. While his rather Hollywood-esque life story and the admiration of the greatest musicians has also fueled interest in him, I believe it is the timeless nature and beauty of his playing—as an act of devotion—that immediately captures the listener's attention, be they amateur or professional.

Dinu Lipatti in performance during his final recital in Besançon, France on September 16, 1950. [Image credit: Michel Meusy, use kindly permitted by the Biblothèque nationale de France, The Estate of Dinu Lipatti, and Wikimedia Commons]