Music: Lipatti’s Last

Two months before he died of Hodgkin’s disease, at 33, Rumanian-born Pianist Dinu Lipatti played for the last time in public, at the 1950 International Festival in Besangon, France. To keep the date, he overrode his doctor’s and his wife’s pleas not to play, was fortified with drugs. Close to fainting at the keyboard, he had to omit the last brief selection on the program, Chopin’s Waltz No. 2 in A Flat. Now, in a 2-LP Angel album, record buyers can listen to that last amazing recital and sample the artistry that made Lipatti one of the finest pianists of the postwar generation.

Illness and World War II kept Lipatti from touring widely. He studied in Paris fled to Switzerland during the war; by the time postwar Europe began to marvel at him, he was no longer well enough to travel. Although he was short and frail, he had the massively muscled shoulders of a boxer and steel-fingered hands. “Macaroni fingers!” he said contemptuously when sometimes he failed to play with his usual precision. A perfectionist, he preferred not to play Beethoven because he felt he was not yet worthy of the music. Along with the big technique and virile style, Lipatti had a remarkable ability, as his teacher Nadia Boulanger noted, to “see better and hear more than we do.” In the present, excellent Angel recording, there are few traces of the deadly strain under which Lipatti played. His Bach Partita No. 1is as coolly articulated and elegant as a jeweled clock, and his Mozart Sonata No. 8 in A Minor (K. 310) seems the reflection of an absorbed and unruffled musical mind. Only an occasional slurred passage in the Chopin waltzes hints at the ordeal at the keyboard.