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Photo courtesy Ivory Classics
By Allan Kozninn
Shura Cherkassky, a Ukrainian-born, London-based pianist whose individualistic interpretive style and affinity for dazzling virtuoso showpieces made him one of the last exponents of the great Romantic keyboard tradition, died on Wednesday at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. He was 84.
Mr. Cherkassky was a small, gnomic figure who could seem unprepossessing and at times self-effacing in interviews and who routinely brushed off his reviews, both positive and negative. He declared himself wholly unfit to teach and described his musical education as sketchy, particularly in the realm of music theory.
He was likely to express, without prompting, his doubts about his ability to play Mozart or Debussy persuasively. And when he spoke about the musical world, the concert and record business or his own place in the scheme of things, he did so with a bemused, almost detached air.
Yet he was a completely commanding figure on the concert stage. His performances of standard repertory works by Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky and Liszt were invariably packed with idiosyncratic twists and turns that made his readings incendiary, and when he played virtuosic Strauss waltz transcriptions by Godowsky and Schulz-Evler, or essays in tone color by Balakirev or Hofmann, he could create the impression that he possessed more than two hands.
Because he was disinclined to play pieces the same way twice, he could be an erratic performer, and there were times when his interpretive experiments went awry. But listeners attended his recitals with the expectation that he would offer them something unusual, and he remained faithful to that expectation, both in his interpretations and his choice of repertory. He could be an adventurer, at times. Though renowned for his readings of 19th- and mainstream 20th-century works, he included music by Berg, Stockhausen, Messiaen, Copland and Bernstein on his programs in recent years.
"I do everything by intuition," Mr. Cherkassky told The New York Times in 1978. "I even live by intuition. For some people it works well, and for some people it would be a disaster. I mean, I can't really recommend what I do for others, because everyone has a different nature. And that goes for piano playing."
Shura Cherkassky was born in Odessa on Oct. 7, 1911. He was given his first piano lessons by his mother, and newspaper articles report extravagant early successes. He is said to have composed a five-act opera when he was 8, and to have conducted an orchestra in Odessa when he was 9, all in addition to giving frequent piano recitals and being hailed as a prodigy.
When he left for New York, at the age of 11, he already had a manager to look after his affairs. His hope was to study with Sergei Rachmaninoff, then his pianistic hero. But after an audition at Rachmaninoff's home on Riverside Drive, the young pianist decided to look elsewhere.
"I'll never forget that," Mr. Cherkassky said in a 1989 interview. "I even played his G-sharp-minor Prelude, and he was very impressed. He said, 'Yes, I'll teach you, but for two years you must not give concerts.' He also wanted me to study with Rosina Lhevinne, to alter my technique. My parents and my manager and I thought we should have a second opinion, so we went to Josef Hofmann, who said, 'No, you must perform, and I will teach you.' "
"I loved Rachmaninoff," Mr. Cherkassky added, "but I don't regret the decision not to study with him. Why he wanted to change my technique has been a puzzle to me all my life."
Mr. Cherkassky studied with Hofmann at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia for about a decade, and kept up his performing career. Comparisons with his teacher were inevitable. After his American debut, in Baltimore in 1923, a reviewer for The Baltimore Sun wrote that "not since the days when Josef Hofmann was a child prodigy has an American audience been so enthralled by a stripling in knickerbockers."
Mr. Cherkassky also studied briefly with Leopold Godowsky, and although he later said that he found Godowsky too fussy, he kept some Godowsky transcriptions in his repertory all through his career.
Throughout the 1920's, Mr. Cherkassky performed regularly in New York, Baltimore and other American cities, and was regularly praised for the vitality and freshness of his readings and the flexibility of his technique. He also undertook a tour of Australia and South Africa in 1927, but did not return to Europe to perform until 1945.
After World War II, Mr. Cherkassky's career took off in Europe and hit a trough in the United States. American reviewers continued to praise his virtuosity but expressed doubts about his depth as an interpreter. He moved to France and then to London, and his visits to the United States became infrequent. A return in the early 1960's seemed promising: Abram Chasins wrote in the 1961 edition of his book "Speaking of Pianists" that Mr. Cherkassky "has complete mastery of the piano, which he handles as though he were putting the instrument through its paces. He has a beautiful tone and commands every shade of color, every variety of touch and texture."
But the Romantic style in which Mr. Cherkassky excelled had fallen out of favor with American audiences, which had come to prefer a less overtly emotional, more literalist and intellectual performing style. That preference persisted through the 1970's, and when Mr. Cherkassky returned to New York in 1976 after a decade's absence, he was still regarded as an anachronism by all but a small circle of connoisseurs.
As Romanticism came back into favor in the 1980's, however, Mr. Cherkassky became something of a cult figure. His return was helped, unquestionably, by a series of recordings he made for Nimbus, an unconventional British company that allows its artists considerable leeway. Earlier in his career, Mr. Cherkassky had said that he disliked recordings because they were "too coldblooded." And indeed, a few earlier recordings lacked the fire of his live performances. But through the 1980's his recordings were plentiful, and included accounts of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, Three Scenes from Stravinsky's "Petrouchka," the Liszt Sonata and disks devoted to Chopin and Schumann.
"At Nimbus," he said, explaining his return to recording, "they make you feel at home. You go to their castle in Wales, you stay for a few days, you walk in the park and you record when you want to. There are no red and green lights, no formal studio. They let you play as if it's a concert, and they don't make you start over whenever anything goes wrong."
Nevertheless, Mr. Cherkassky left Nimbus in 1990 when the larger Decca/London company agreed to record his concerts and to release archival performances recorded by the BBC. Decca/London released a recording of Mr. Cherkassky's 80th-birthday concert at Carnegie Hall, in 1991, as well as a set drawn from two 1975 recitals recorded in London.
Offstage, Mr. Cherkassky was a superb raconteur, and when he was in New York he held court for visiting journalists and musicians at his suite in the Hotel Pierre. He had a way of proving a point by seeming to deny that it had any validity.
"I'm a little tired of being called 'the last Romantic,' " he told one interviewer, and then went on to describe himself in entirely Romantic terms. "I just play the way I want to. And that can change from one night to the next.
Mr. Cherkassky never gave up performing, and was to tour Japan in February.
No immediate family members survive.
First published at The New York Times, December 29, 1995
