Shura Cherkassky

At the close of his life Cherkassky was widely hailed as the final exponent of the great Romantic tradition at the keyboard. He united an instinctive Romantic refinement of touch with the sheer sonic force of a contemporary virtuoso, moving with equal assurance from the standard Romantic literature to the demanding scores of Ives, Hindemith, Boulez, and Ligeti. That distinctive fusion proved especially persuasive in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Brought by his parents to the United States in 1923, he soon entered the studio of Josef Hofmann at the recently established Curtis Institute. Early engagements included an appearance with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, a recital at the White House, and a 1928 tour that took him to Australia and South Africa. Although he committed a handful of performances to disc in the 1920s and 1930s, his international profile remained modest until after the Second World War, when he settled in London. By then the generation of pianists—Hofmann among them—who had studied directly with Liszt, Moszkowski, and their contemporaries had disappeared, leaving Cherkassky recognized as the inheritor of that interpretive lineage. Like his predecessors, he cultivated a highly personal manner that seemed to illuminate every score anew. Throughout his mature years he maintained an almost uninterrupted schedule of international engagements, setting aside time each year for a retreat in Thailand. His first Russian appearances, greeted with acclaim, occurred in 1976; he returned for further tours in 1977 and 1987. In 1986 New York’s 92nd Street Y inaugurated the annual Shura Cherkassky Recital Award for emerging pianists in tribute to the many recitals he had presented there. The majority of his commercial recordings date from his later decades and encompass the core of his Romantic repertoire, with the most characteristic examples appearing on the Decca and Nimbus labels.