The best Chopin player?
- Douglas Cairns
- Dec 19, 2025
- 2 min read
In an interview (2021) with Joe Sabia, Alan Walker, Emeritus Professor of Music at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and author of two important and authoritative biographies (of Liszt and of Chopin), said this:
"The longer you live and the longer you look back, the more likely it is that you’ll have favourites that the modern generation don’t like or never heard of; so it becomes a generational thing as well. Whenever I’m giving public talks I often point out that for me, the three greatest Chopin interpreters on record are Dinu Lipatti, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Arthur Rubinstein. I am constantly amazed by how many people disagree with me.
"As for interpretation, you make a mess of it if you try to put too much of yourself into it. Many younger pianists do that because they think that the performance is about them. No, I would reply. It’s about the composer. Don’t get in the way, don’t interfere. Aristocratic detachment is the preferred attitude. All three pianists that I mentioned have that quality in common. They don’t get in the way. For the rest, what we call interpretation represents about five percent of the music over which the player exerts control."
In an interview (October 2025) in Warsaw with Filip Lech, he explained: "They are all very different pianists, but they all share one thing: a respect for the score, while at the same time leaving themselves just enough space to be Rubinstein or Lipatti. I think it can be objectively demonstrated that these three had what it takes to show Chopin at his very best.
Chopin scholarship is now focused on getting the Urtext right, and the task of scholars is to tell the performers, ‘This is the correct text’. My response is that if you simply reproduce the Urtext, all you’ve done is reproduce a document. What we want is to know what you think of that document as a pianist – to put a part of yourself into it. The criterion is driving the performance down the middle, so you are true to the Urtext and true to yourself."