Ignaz Friedman was born Salomon Izaak Freudmann on 13 February 1882 in Podgorze, a town beside Krakow, the son of an itinerant Jewish musician. He was a child prodigy; his teachers included Flora Grzywinska in Krakow, Hugo Riemann in Leipzig and, in Vienna, Theodor Leschetizky, whose studio also produced Paderewski and Schnabel. He took part in Ferruccio Busoni’s master classes.

His official Vienna debut in 1904 was a programme of three concertos in one evening — the Brahms D minor, the Tchaikovsky B flat minor and the Liszt E flat — a feat that put him beside established figures such as Busoni and Godowsky, and he stayed at that level. Touring began there and ran for some forty years; he is credited with about 2,800 concerts. He lived in Berlin until 1914 and settled in Copenhagen in 1920.

The recordings were made for Columbia, across the change from the acoustic to the electrical process. The earliest surviving sides date from 1923; the Chopin mazurkas come from sessions between 1923 and 1930; a final group was cut in London in 1933 and 1936. The mazurka sessions were laborious, one mazurka going through nine takes before either the pianist or the engineers would pass it. Naxos later gathered the whole of it into a five-CD Complete Recordings edition, and the Duo-Art and Condon Collection piano rolls survive alongside it.

At the outbreak of the Second World War Friedman was in Europe and got out on an Australian concert tour offered at the last moment, at the invitation of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He settled in Sydney. His last concert there was on 24 July 1943, after which neuritis in the left hand forced him off the platform for good, and he died in Sydney on 26 January 1948.

He also composed more than ninety works, mostly piano miniatures, with pieces for cello and a piano quintet; he arranged Bach and Scarlatti, and edited an almost complete edition of Chopin’s piano works as well as editions of Schumann and Liszt. Much of what he broadcast is gone, including hours of radio recordings made in Australia and New Zealand.

Friedman matters for what his records preserve, not merely for what they document. He was a Leschetizky pupil in the generation of Paderewski and Schnabel, and his Chopin — the mazurkas first — is held by many to be unsurpassed, as is that of his compatriot and contemporary Moriz Rosenthal. Naxos’s notes on the 1923-26 sides say the mazurka recordings are now legendary in the annals of piano playing.

What is heard is a style rather than a set of effects. Contemporaries described the playing as quiet and effortless, carried by a sense of rhythm and colour and grounded in a sovereign technique; the hallmark is a devotion to the score worked out through an evolving rubato and a great deal of interior detail. Rachmaninoff admired him and thought him a great virtuoso in a manner more romantic than his own. Harold Schonberg wrote of the Chopin Nocturne in E flat, Op. 55 No. 2, that it may well be the most beautiful and perfectly proportioned reading of the piece on record.

That manner had no future in the America of his later years, where younger critics had grown used to a modernist playing that stripped romantic interpretation of its agogics, and Friedman never took hold there. He is one of the last representatives of the era he came out of, and there is no other route back to it: much of his recorded material is lost, including hours of radio broadcasts made in Australia and New Zealand. What survives — the Columbia Chopin, the nine Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, the Grieg concerto with orchestra, the Kreutzer Sonata with Bronislaw Huberman, and the piano rolls — is the whole of the evidence for how one of the supreme virtuosi of his day actually played.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Friedman
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Friedman
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Friedman
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Friedman
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1657463
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Leschetizky
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Ignaz%20Friedman.jpg
• https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.110684
• https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.111114
• https://interlude.hk/forgotten-pianists-ignaz-friedman/
• https://classical-pianists.net/generation-vii/ignaz-friedman/
• https://www.steinway.com/artists/ignaz-friedman
• https://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=json&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DkSPwuSvuP5I