Treatises, epistolary records, period instruments and their replicas all have parts to play in recovering how a given repertoire (might have) sounded in the past – wie es eigentlich gewesen, as Leopold Ranke famously exhorted. Among musicologists, there has been a sense that reconstructing nineteenth-century period instruments was a necessary prelude to mapping ‘the broader issues raised by Romantic keyboard music and the instruments’,Footnote ¹ as well as the recognition that the sounds of the past are understood to be always in dialogue with those of the present.Footnote ² When searching for how the past might have sounded, something of our own musical selves is revealed. Hubert Rutkowski's album, Chopin on Pleyel 1847, may be understood, then, as a contribution to this ongoing conversation between past and present, self and other.Footnote ³ The ‘Pleyel 1847’ in this case is an instrument from the private collection of Adam and Barbara Wibrowski, and the CD's liner notes indicate that the recorded repertoire was chosen to ‘present the whole spectrum of sound possibilities available’ to it (p. 7).

Rutkowski counts Karol Mikuli, Raul Koczalski, and Moritz Rosenthal among his musical influences, and the boldness of his conceptions and the nuances of his interpretive gestures certainly remind me of these pianists. I find Rutkowski's sound to be occasionally percussive, with a glassy tone in the upper registers, qualities apparent especially in Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G minor. Throughout, judicious pedalling allows for sharply chiselled voice leading, and the arpeggiated chords, so often delivered as vertical sonorities, direct our attention to the rhythmic and melodic independence of the voices. Temporal ‘de-synchronization’ of the right and left hands is a characteristic interpretive device of the older pianistic styles that frame Rutkowski's approach. I find that Rutkowski overuses this expressive gesture throughout the recording, including in the G minor Ballade.

Nicholas Cook has pointed out that mazurkas, as a compositional genre, are representations of dance rather than actual dances, and they call forth an ‘extraordinarily strong sense of embodiment’.Footnote ⁴ In Rutkowski's recording of the Mazurka no. 2 in C major op. 24, it is precisely this sense of embodied dance that I sometimes missed, my attention distracted by Rutkowski's aural quest to narrate the mazurka as an historical document. The Pleyel's sonority, ‘free from density and weight’ (p. 8), is deployed to greater effect in Mazurka no. 1 in B-flat major op. 7, and this lightness of sonority helps to project the mazurka's sonic embodiment of dance. There is an appealing simplicity to Rutkowski's interpretation, although I feel that the trills too often have a percussive tone. This may be connected to difficulties that the pianist himself ascribes to the Pleyel's action, especially in softer passages. In contrast to present-day instruments, the Pleyel mechanism lacks a ‘double repetition’ (p. 8), that is, the double-escapement action pioneered by Erard and rejected by Pleyel on musical grounds that Chopin himself supported.Footnote ⁵

Rutkowski's interpretation of the Nocturne no. 2 in F-sharp minor op. 48 is sometimes disrupted by punchy left-hand chords and by exaggerated phrase peaks in the right-hand melody. Dotted rhythmic figures, overly clipped for my taste, throw the harmonic progressions off course. The fleet-fingered trills are impressive, given the instrument's design; it is startling to read about the ‘correct way to perform those trills’ on the Pleyel (p. 8), as found in both the Nocturne and in the Mazurka in A minor. So much of what performers do is dependent on the vagaries of performing or recording environments; to lay such a dogmatic claim seems unwise. The rigidity of Rutkowski's formulation also seems out of step with both his evocative descriptions of the ‘sonorous effect reminding us of a trembling, vibrating voice’ (p. 8) and his actual rendering of these expressive moments.

Rutkowski's performance of the Fantasy Impromptu in C-sharp minor op. 66 is tremendous, such that it defamiliarized my own relationship to this music when I first listened to this recording. At times, I feel that hesitations at the beginnings and endings of phrases are overused, lessening the dynamism of the outer sections. The middle section, in D-flat major, projects a beautiful sense of repose, and the cross rhythms, delivered with precision, nonetheless preserve the warmly lyrical atmosphere. In the tonally vague opening of the Mazurka no. 4 in B-flat minor op. 24, Rutkowski captures the mood of chromatic restlessness, without losing the larger shape. The finely calibrated balance between chordal voices is occasionally pierced by a tonal glint that devolves into harshness. This small criticism aside, however, I find myself especially moved by Rutkowski's expressive shading of unison phrases. The pianist's arpeggiated opening of the Scherzo in B minor op. 20 robs the dissonance of its harmonic bite. Rutkowski locates this arpeggiation within ‘the performing practice from [the] 19th century’ (p. 7), but I remain musically unconvinced. The rapid, interlocking passages in the stormy outer sections sound choppy, and I want greater dynamic contrast to project the music's narrative arc. Later on the disk, Rutkowski dances his way through the Waltz no. 1 in D-flat major op. 64 in a highly persuasive manner; The richly undulating melody is delivered with wonderful vitality. A brilliant descending scale brings this piece, and the recording, to a snappy finish.

The CD's liner notes, written by Rutkowski himself, are informative, but typographical errors and un-idiomatic English (‘arpeggiating accords’) combined with complicated formulations such as ‘agogic independence of both hands or voices’ (p. 7) are distracting. Rutkowski's stated concern with the ‘genuine Chopin sound’ (p. 6) is a chimera, now widely recognized as such. Signalling his awareness that the past remains unknowable, and inaudible, Rutkowski points to dissonances between the concerns of pianists and musicologists (p. 4), but I would like him to raise the stakes in these debates. I find his reference to ‘so-called Chopin style’ (p. 4) in this regard curiously sceptical given his aesthetic concerns and his recommended performance practices, based on understanding how Chopin played his own music, on studying a variety of editions, and, of course, on playing period instruments. To be sure, these are all valuable, even necessary components of any informed pianism. But Rutkowski does not clarify how pianists and musicologists might differ in the sensibilities and critical engagements they bring to these musical domains. Notably absent from the liner notes is an analysis of nineteenth-century tuning practices. Given the complex realities of instruments of Chopin's time, in terms of voicing, action regulation, and tuning, the liner notes could have guided the listener through this complex sonic terrain.Footnote ⁶

Rutkowski observes that the Pleyel gives ‘the impression of a direct contact with the strings. However, the mechanism of this instrument does not help the pianist to bring out the sound, in the same way a contemporary piano does’ (pp. 5–6). Later, however, he argues that this instrument ‘enables a very transparent communication of all the sounds and sound levels, something that is not possible to achieve to such an extent on a contemporary piano’ (p. 7, my emphasis). I am left wondering about the apparent contradiction between these two claims. Rutkowski's new disk thus seems to sonically exemplify Jonathan Bellman's observation (made in a different context) that both the historically informed performer and the musicologist work among echoes of the past – ‘fragments and imitations of Chopin's pianism are all that remains’.Footnote ⁷