If I were hypothetically teaching some sort of “piano recordings survey” course, I’d have all of the reference Fauré recordings by Marguerite Long (1874–1966) on my required listening list, especially her peerless ballade. Her early Ravel concerto with Pedro de Freitas-Branco and her smattering of Debussy recordings are historically significant as well and will certainly be of interest to those with a penchant for old-school French pianism (her Debussy first arabesque is a clear stand-out here).
Beyond that, most of her solo Chopin is hardly essential given the number of great performances of this composer’s music out there; however, two of these performances that I would recommend above all others would be her wayward, highly idiosyncratic take on the A-flat major waltz (Op. 64/3) and her crisp, passionate second scherzo. Her late recording of the Chopin F Minor concerto, too, is a highlight, and it’s next in line for me after her Fauré. In addition, Long’s Beethoven Emperor collaboration is highly recommended for those with a zest for novelty like me but may not be appreciated by those with preconceptions about this venerable mainstay in the concerto canon.
Solo Interpretation (14/20)
French pianists often seem to fall short of achieving the level of success on the international stage that Russian—or perhaps even German or Italian—ones do. Two notable exceptions to this “rule” were Alfred Cortot and Samson François (a student of both Cortot and Long). Both were iconoclasts who, while doubtless benefitting immensely from their pedagogical tradition’s thorough training, also rebelled against its obsessions with the notions of jeu perlé and plus de clarté and gained a wider global recognition in the process. Marguerite Long, on the other hand, was the doyenne of the quintessentially French style of piano playing that emphasized finger independence, litheness, evenness, volubility, and lightness avant tout. In a pianistic world that often hails men for blustering through virtuoso repertoire, Madame Long’s brand of rarefied feminine elegance has sometimes been myopically dismissed as superficial outside France—by those who’ve listened to her playing at all, that is.
The “Big 3” French Composers
In her day, Madame Long was regarded as a veritable national treasure by the classical music establishment within the borders of her native country. Frequently described as an “ambassador for French music” by her biographer Cecilia Dunoyer among others, Long forged friendships with some of the greatest French composers of the day, including Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and especially Gabriel Fauré, whose music1There are few individual Wikipedia entries for Fauré’s piano pieces, but this general entry contains a comprehensive, albeit brief, survey of the composer’s piano works. Long is most closely associated with.
Besides maybe Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, or Bartók playing their own music, I can think of few happier unions between a composer and an interpreter than that between Long and Fauré. Pity that she recorded only a fraction of the works she performed live. Besides her F-sharp major ballade for piano and orchestra (see “Collaborations” section below), she committed to disc two each of Fauré’s barcarolles, impromptus, and nocturnes, almost every one of which approaches perfection for this listener. Of special mention for yours truly are her G major barcarolle (Op. 41) and D-flat major nocturne (Op. 63). For me Long’s G major barcarolle is the highlight of her later Fauré recordings from the 1950s and has a peculiar quasi-Viennese charm to it: tragic but never serious. Long airily skips through this secret garden of Fauré’s, displaying her usual diamond-hard, yet butterfly-light, touch as well as her extraordinary attention to detail from a close range. One might say it was miked a little too closely, resulting in a tinny sound at times (I was reminded of the final recording sessions of Simon Barere from the 1950s in this respect). Though recorded much earlier, her rendering of the D-flat major nocturne is even more extraordinary, with amorous outbursts in the outer sections punctuated by a middle section of supreme precision, rapidity, and souplesse. Long plays the two Fauré impromptus she recorded superbly as well, imparting to each the eponymous improvisatory quality. I’ve never much liked the F-sharp minor impromptu (Op. 102), finding it gratingly unrelenting and repetitious, but her quicksilver finger technique seems ideally suited to the piece’s rippling, etude-like patterns. And the subtly timed hesitations at the staccato climaxes in the F minor impromptu (Op. 31) are priceless (ditto the teasing hesitation after the waltzlike bass notes at the beginning of the E-flat major nocturne, Op. 36). Perhaps the only one of Long’s Fauré recordings in which I can hear any room for improvement is the E-flat major barcarolle, Op. 70, which seems a bit on the clipped side. Nevertheless, even that one would most likely be in contention for one of the top performances of Fauré’s piano music of all time. True, Germaine Thyssens-Valentin, a later Fauré “specialist,” may have recorded nearly all of the composer’s solo piano music, but she fails to capture a tenth of the nuance in her many discs that Madame Long typically does in 10 seconds.
The few pieces of Debussy Madame Long recorded are also a must-listen, though overall she appears to have less of an affinity for this composer than for Fauré. The highlight of her Debussy recordings is her first arabesque, much brusquer than one is used to hearing with this famous piece but a refreshing antidote to all of the soggy renditions out there from the likes of Aldo Ciccolini. On the other hand, her playing of the second arabesque, while impeccably articulated as usual, seems too rhythmically driven at times: she could breathe more between the humorous skips of the triplets. Similar observations could be made regarding Long’s interpretations of the Jardins sous la pluie and La plus que lente, the former of which often gushes while the latter could have more waltzlike charm to it and even sounds strangely heavy-handed at the climaxes. In her defense, there’s also considerably greater competition in Debussy’s music, which has become a more entrenched part of the standard repertory. As with Fauré, I wish she’d recorded more of the pieces she performed in concert so that we had a better picture. It would have been particularly illuminating to have her individual take on Debussy’s very greatest works for the piano, like some of the preludes, etudes (which she premiered), or L’isle joyeuse, alongside those of such critically acclaimed interpreters of this music as Walter Gieseking, Samson François, or Jean Yves-Thibaudet. This observation applies even more so to Ravel, since Long didn’t record a single solo work of this composer despite being highly praised in the 1920s for her performance of the retro suite Le tombeau de Couperin on the concert stage (I’d imagine the sparkling lucidity of her playing would have also made her an ideal interpreter of the Jeux d’eau).
Chopin
The rest of Long’s solo discography consisted of Chopin (with the exception of a couple of vomitous short pieces by the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud that Long nearly manages to make palatable). As one would expect, she captures the typically French aspects of Chopin well, such as surface polish and textural clarity, even if she often fails to strip away more than the top layers of the Polish rhapsode’s genius to reveal the bitterness, tragedy, and neuroticism at his core.
As one of Chopin’s more aggressive, extroverted works, the fantasy (Op. 49) seems an odd repertory choice for her, and indeed I find it to be the weakest of her three forays into Chopin’s more epic-length compositions. In particular, listeners may wish to fast forward past her sleepwalking through slower sections like the resolute opening march (her dotted rhythms are annoyingly fluffy) or the serene chorale before the recapitulation (which should comfort the soul, not act as a soporific). In the piece proper, she explodes through the triplets in the faster sections with the energy of a bull but then inappropriately languishes like a napping cat in the more melodic moments (a little slackening might be appropriate but not such grotesque lagging). The runs are technically impressive and fluid but musically I hear tightness rather than amorous passion or sweep. Despite some novel subtleties in her dynamic shadings and rubati, what appears fundamentally missing from her performance is an understanding of the work’s central coherence. How to make Chopin’s quasi-schizophrenic transitions between the slower and faster sections hang together in this masterwork, one of the composer’s longest, is indeed a formidable difficulty. She could have perhaps reflected more on how to variegate the three permutations of the primary thematic material to avoid monotony.
Madame Long’s takes on the other two big Chopin pieces she set to disc, the barcarolle (Op. 60) and second scherzo (Op. 31), are more successful. Her second scherzo is probably my favorite of her solo Chopin performances overall and is particularly noteworthy for its rhythmic drive, including mordantly clear triplets (even if she does occasionally rush them a bit). Unlike her performance of the fantasy, her second scherzo interpretation seems well structured in addition to exhibiting an appropriate sense of trollish things. Successfully voicing Chopin’s contrapuntal complexities, she caps her reading of the work off with a coda of boundless panache that would have made Richter jealous. Her take on the barcarolle is more problematic, but whose interpretation of this maddeningly subtle work isn’t? Even if Long’s rhythm is a bit jerky at times and her touch too brittle, I appreciate that she doesn’t moon or milk: she seems to understand why the composer is likely to have marked the tempo as allegretto instead of andante or adagio, a point that appears beyond the ken of self-indulgent hacks like Arthur Rubinstein who seem content to roll around in their shallow little ponds of mud. Long’s Venetian boatride sometimes veers toward a capsize, but there’s at least enough shoreside scenery to make it a worthwhile excursion, even if a few erratic ideas splash up at the listener’s ears along the way.
The more casual pianophile may wish to forgo listening to Long’s recordings of smaller-scale Chopin works altogether, though aficionados may find something to enjoy. The fleet-footed passagework in her fantasy-impromptu is a little breathless, but the technical control, fluidity, and evenness are impressive. However, the tempo is often inconsistent; in particular, the lyrical portions, like the sentimental D-flat major middle section, could sing more and drag less. The in-your-face marcato at the conclusion is a memorable detail, even if it’s a tad on the rough side. Her berceuse rendition, on the other hand, is an appropriately restful take on Chopin’s lullaby but could do with a modicum of character: she doesn’t put her personal touch on it in the way that, say, Cortot or Hofmann does. Plus, the phrases often hiccup, with variational passagework that alternates too noticeably between lagging and lurching. The F-sharp minor (Op. 59/3) mazurka, too, is passable but also rather perfunctory and undancelike, lacking in rhythmic interest as well as polyphonic intricacy. I’m admittedly intrigued, however, by the quick and quirky rubato she employs to capture the topsy-turvy nature of the A-flat waltz (Op. 64/3) even though it veers toward distortion, even solipsism, at times. In any event, while most of these Chopin recordings merit a listen for their smooth technical delivery, they probably won’t offer all that much of interest, I’d argue, except to the completist.
Specific quibbles aside, I find Long’s directness in Chopin to be both a strength and weakness. While her markedly transparent, unsentimental approach, including a catclaw-sharp touch, is refreshing after all the opaque smarminess of new-school representatives such as Pollini or Rubinstein, she sometimes fails to catch the scent of some of the composer’s more subtle fragrances. Long’s approach to Chopin tends to lack the requisite soulfulness of expression, as well as dynamic and rhythmic range, to be in serious contention with the greatest interpreters of his music like Cortot, Hofmann, Friedman, Neuhaus, Sofronitsky, François, Rosenthal, or possibly even Koczalski or Malcuzynski. Not that that’s automatically any strike against her: not all good interpreters need to be good on Chopin, his hallowed reputation as the premier piano composer notwithstanding.
Concluding Thoughts
For me, Marguerite Long’s playing exemplifies what the famed ballet choreographer George Balanchine once said: “Ballet is woman”: I think one could just as easily substitute “Long’s playing” for “ballet” in that pithy observation. When Long was at her best, her success lay in her delicate balancing act of grace and strength akin to a ballerina’s pirouette. Complementing her dazzling fingerwork was the authenticity she brought to French music through her close connections to three great composers, especially Fauré but Debussy and Ravel as well. Long didn’t just conceive of these interpretations, she inhabited them.
Collaborations (7/10)
Unusually for a golden-age pianist, Marguerite Long’s collaborations with other artists take up over half the space on her roughly five-CD discography. Her primary contributions in the ensemble arena are works for piano and orchestra, including concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Ravel as well as other miscellaneous works, a total of nine pieces. (By contrast, Long’s rival Cortot recorded over 30 discs’ worth of solo piano music, including many of the major works of Chopin and Schumann, but only five different works for piano and orchestra.)
A Fauré Ballade for the Ages
My paean to Long’s solo Fauré recordings (see “Solo Interpretation” section above) applies even more so to her earlier performance (1933) of the composer’s F-sharp major ballade with Philippe Gaubert—which, incidentally, was first written for solo piano (in 1877) before no less a virtuoso than Franz Liszt, finding this version too difficult, advised the younger composer to rewrite it for piano and orchestra in 1881 (the solo version actually tends to be more often performed today). One would be at pains to find anything to criticize in this masterpiece of a performance, which is among my favorite of all time. I find myself returning to this “re-creative” interpretation again and again to hear new intricacies of tone and nuance. To my mind, it deserves to compete in the agon for greatness with such indisputable classics as Glenn Gould’s Bach Goldberg Variations or Rachmaninov’s own playing of his four concertos. She transports us to a fairy realm above the clouds, exhibiting meticulous attention to the subtlest tone gradations yet managing to sound as if she’s delivering it off the cuff. For every breath she draws in, lavender-redolent sighs are exhaled. One only need hear her inimitable anticipatory rubato in those first few left-hand chords to recognize that one has entered an uncharted and ineffable world of pianism. Now I know how Tolkien’s Bilbo must have felt when he caught his first glimpse of the sunlight-shimmering waterfalls in the elven kingdom of Rivendell. Would that Long could have created the same tension, contrasts, and range of touch in her Chopin as she does in her fey treatment of the melodies and rubato here.
One wonders why, after granting posterity such a glimpse into the sublime, Long would have bothered recording the Fauré ballade again, as she did in the 1950s with André Cluytens. True, she may only be competing with herself in this work. But simply put, now in her 80s, she sounds fatigued. In the opening andante, one can hear in the rubato shades of her former interpretation but the phrases have lost their spontaneity, briskness, and sense of direction. And the glittering passagework in the allegro moderato has lost its luster, partly because the tempo is torpid by comparison (the tubby, overly reverberant recorded sound doesn’t help). Cluytens, a conductor I’ve liked in other collaborations (e.g., the Rachmaninov third with Gilels), also sounds lethargic, providing little more than tepid-sounding background music to Long’s solo.
Chopin and Ravel Concertos
Interestingly, however, the duo is far more convincing in their interpretation of Chopin’s second piano concerto. In my opinion, this is probably Long’s next greatest recording after her Fauré interpretations considered as a whole. As with the Fauré ballade, she recorded this concerto twice, first in 1930 (with Gaubert, as in her earlier version of the ballade) and then in the 1950s with Cluytens. Though the late recording was made only three years earlier than the late rendition of the Fauré ballade, Long displays the vitality of a young woman in this performance, speedily tossing off filigree but controlling her tempi much better than she does in the Gaubert rendition. She seems to have finally achieved her peace with Chopin in this performance: her accents are crisp without harshness, her tone is full without dryness, and her pedaling is lush without muddiness. The orchestra also seems to play a more prominent role than it often does (like the Fauré ballade, the Chopin concertos are more like solo piano pieces with orchestral accompaniment).
As she had done with the Fauré ballade and Chopin second piano concerto, Long also recorded Ravel’s G major concerto twice within parallel time frames (1932 and 1952 in this case). This maverick concerto, heavily incorporating jazz and folk music elements, was premiered by Long both live, in January 1932, and three months later in April on recording. Although the composer himself led the Orchestre Lamoureux in the official premiere, he is often erroneously cited as the conductor of the studio version as well, which was actually produced under the baton of the obscure Portuguese conductor Pedro de Freitas-Branco. (Ever the self-effacing perfectionist, Ravel did not consider his conducting professionally up to snuff and instead supervised the recording from behind the scenes.) The crispness and level of detail in this seminal performance with Freitas-Branco are astounding, beginning with the frenetic tootings of the piccolo and trumpet at the outset. At times it seems just a bit too intense, however, and the pair could do with more improvisatory freedom a la Long’s student Samson François (who was a jazz pianist in addition to a classical virtuoso). While I find the outer movements slightly on the fast and uptight side, Long’s approach to the contemplative middle movement is the highlight: in her transparent phrasing of its simple tune (the first half of this movement is played entirely by the pianist), she conveys a reserved melancholia that would also be appropriate in a Mozart slow movement. Unfortunately, like her second Fauré ballade, Long’s 1950s recording of this concerto with Georges Tzipine suffers from sluggishness and opaqueness, a sign that her meticulously honed technique, even though it was still basically intact, was beginning to show the wrinkles of old age. Tzipine’s clumsily balanced conducting didn’t help matters any.
Beethoven and Mozart Collaborations
Long’s recordings of Beethoven’s third and fifth piano concertos, on the other hand, are perhaps the most pleasant surprises in her entire discography. It’s refreshing to hear these playful, lighthearted takes on concertos that all too often risk being squashed under the weight of self-importance. A second surprise is that, whereas I’d think the more classical third concerto would better suit her typically restrained emotional style, she rises even more to the challenge of the regal Emperor concerto, stating her claim to this golden throne of the piano concerto literature by conveying a unique combination of Beethovenien dramatic exuberance, German-style bumptiousness, and French surface polish. Long’s smoothness and evenness in passagework here are extraordinary, including some remarkably fleet-fingered—almost glissando-like but mirror-clear—scales in the first movement. In addition, the broad paysage of the middle-movement adagio is magnificently shaped. And she bounds through the rustic dance elements in the terminal movement with both humor and verve. Though Long’s Beethoven third is a worthy contender as well, she seems less emotionally invested in it than in the fifth (as I would be too): thus, her unrivaled fluidity occasionally gets the best of her, causing her to rush forward and lose her rhythmic bite. Part of the problem, too, is Felix Weingartner’s flabby, permissive conducting of a mediocre conservatory orchestra whose gushing tempi also need to be reined in.
Long’s Mozart A major concerto (K. 488) suffers from this same problem, only much more pronouncedly and without the concomitant enthusiasm of her Beethoven third. While her fingerwork may be a model of légèreté, Mozart isn’t French puff pastry. The outer movements in this performance are fluffy without a consistent sense of tempo, alternating between sprinting forward and dallying. Meanwhile, the otherworldly middle movement—a heavenly lament in isolation that could accompany a reading of one of Ovid’s Tristia—lacks any hint of the lachyrmae rerum these phrases sing of. In her defense, many other golden-age pianists—as exhibited, say, on the few Mozart recordings of Horowitz and Rachmaninoff—also seem not to have been bequeathed a good understanding of the mordant precision that typifies classic-period composers. It can be said that for such pianists, Mozart and Haydn constitute piano prehistory and evolution proper begins with Beethoven.
I have similar bones to pick with Long’s collaborations with Jacques Thibaud on two of Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano, especially the one in B-flat major (K. 378). The sound may be refined, but rhythmically I find it a bit of a mess, marred by dramatically vacillating tempi that cause the work to lose its sense of classical proportion. The ensemble is also rather sloppy at times and, though Thibaud’s famed singing tone makes for a pleasant enough listening experience, his clarity leaves something to be desired—in particular, his notes could be more distinct in the brisker tempi. On a sunnier note, the duo’s performance of the A major sonata is significantly more precise and polished, which is perhaps why it was the only one of the two that was released on CD. This is still not to say it’s ideal Mozart playing, however. The lightness is remarkable, but the extremely clipped tempi make it all sound rather flippant and impatient.
French and Spanish Arcana
Outside her more mainstream contributions to the annals of piano collaboration, Long was often a cheerleader for contemporary works from her native France and surrounding countries. In addition to setting to disc tone poems for piano and orchestra by the recondite composers Vincent d’Indy and Ernesto Halffter, she premiered Darius Milhaud’s first piano concerto in 1934 (as she had done two years earlier with Ravel’s piano concerto). Long’s brisk, matter-of-fact performance of this musical equivalent of dyspepsia is about as good as one can hope for; in particular, her percussive strength in the final movement is impressive, I must say, for a diminutive French woman. The d’Indy Symphony on a French Mountain Air is a significantly more tuneful and appealing work filled with lively pastoral motifs and would be nice to listen to in the car on a Sunday drive in the country even if it occasionally devolves into Hollywood-esque schmaltz. The Halffter Rapsodia portuguesa (or Rapsodie portugaise in French, as used in the discography table) is a different matter: I’m frankly not sure how anyone could bear practicing this laughably simplistic cento of derivative Spanish dance themes that could have been snatched from a bullfighting flick. The castanet-clicking effects are especially cornball. Long and her conductor Charles Munch would both need a lot more Latin flair to compensate for the piece’s triteness. This is a work for an indigenous Spanish-music guru such as Alicia de Larrocha.
The Two Fauré Quartets
Luckily for the rest of us, however, Fauré was in Long’s blood. In addition to her unrivaled interpretation of the ballade, she joined up with some of the more prominent French string players of the day for the two Fauré quartets. The recording of the second quartet in G minor (Op. 45) significantly outstrips the first, but the former was also recorded roughly 15 years earlier when Long’s fingers were still spry. This is a hyper-elegant performance in which Thibaud’s soaring lines are complemented by Long’s crystalline sound. The cello and viola parts played by Pierre Fournier and Maurice Vieux, respectively, are a bit nondescript, however. In the first quartet in C minor (Op. 15), recorded when she was 82, she sounds a bit of a superannuated silhouette of her former self, betraying hints of struggle one had rarely heard in earlier days. Nevertheless, as with the later version of the ballade, it would still be a recommendable entry-level performance besides being in noticeably better sound than the performance of the second quartet with Thibaud et al. I hasten to add, too, that even this comparatively underwhelming performance is still vastly preferable to hopelessly plodding ensemble recordings featuring more recent Fauré “specialists” like Paul Crossley.
Concluding Thoughts
Despite the occasional less-than-stellar moment among Long’s ensemble efforts, it’s nevertheless a strong, if under-representative, body of work in which the Fauré recordings shine as the brightest stars. If her Beethoven fifth and Chopin second piano concertos are breaths of fresh air, her Fauré ballade is an exhalation from the angels. A powerful male pianist like Richter or Gilels may reach the summit of Kilimanjaro in the Brahms second, but Long’s Fauré transports us from there to the clouds beyond.
Technique (8/10)
Though she had strength limitations owing to her slight build, few pianists, male or female, were as solidly grounded as Long in the basic technical elements. The French have a long history of looking at keyboard technique through a more analytical lens, beginning with Baroque composers such as François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Marguerite Long does her progenitors prouder than anyone else I’ve heard in terms of the country’s tradition of hyper-independent fingers. Specifically, her even tone production, limpid clarity, and virginal transparency are second to none—even compared with her technique-obsessed countrywoman Jeanne-Marie Darré.
One could perhaps not describe Long’s technical approach any better than Fauré himself did, when he succinctly said in a review of one of her concerts that she exhibited “clean, solid, impeccable virtuosity.” Indeed, to navigate Fauré’s deceptively difficult piano writing—containing widely spaced arpeggiations and tremendous harmonic and polyphonic complexity—with her level of freedom and transparency requires a technique of the highest order of refinement. In addition, her scales and trills are of particular note. Perhaps only Wilhelm Backhaus’s are more fluid, and they’re not as fastidiously clear. Even a stern titan like Beethoven may have flashed a big-hearted grin if he heard her uncanny evenness and pearly translucence in the scale flourishes and extended trills in his Emperor concerto. Her robust firmness of attack in the grander chordal passages of this masterwork is also a welcome surprise—as it is, too, in her bedrock-solid handling of the notorious contrary-motion parallel octave leaps in the Chopin fantasy. Long can tighten up when the music is outside her expressive Fach, and she doesn’t have nearly the dynamic palette in her musical arsenal that Cortot does, but the ease and evenness of her execution are generally nothing if not comme il faut, even when the going gets a bit bigger and hairier.
It’s worth mentioning that as the grande dame of one of the two main schools of piano playing in France in the early twentieth century (the patriarch of the other being Cortot), Long also developed her own piano “method.” Like Cortot in his Principes rationelles de la technique pianistique, Long devises a plethora of exercises in her Le piano, divided by chapter according to type of difficulty. While Long’s opus never became anywhere near the internationally recognized bible for solving technical problems that Cortot’s did, those who crave arcane pedagogical piano lore would do well to check it out.
Versatility (2/5)
Marguerite Long’s discography didn’t extend far beyond French music, especially since one can, of course, consider Chopin half French. Though her Fauré is universally superlative and her Chopin is generally worthy of consideration, she never waded into the darker interpretive waters of, say, the later German or Russian romantics, at least on record. In concert, she reportedly experimented with bigger repertory, such as Liszt’s “Rákóczy March” Hungarian rhapsody or Franck’s Variations symphoniques, but I have a hard time imagining her on such physically taxing, extroverted works, and most of her concert programs appeared to emphasize the usual “big 3” Frenchmen with the occasional work by other household names like Chopin or Liszt tossed in. The modernist works for piano and orchestra she set to disc may be relatively uncharted territory, but it would be fine with me if these barren islands in her discography were to forever remain lost in the sea of time.
Long’s insularly French style—underscored by her use of the prickly-actioned Érard piano rather than the globally admired Steinway used by Cortot and so many other big-name pianists—probably isn’t conducive to repertory versatility. Besides French music, the classics may suit her white-hot refinement the best. Though I’m musically disappointed by her Mozart, the elegance and grace of the sound are admittedly laudable. And I’m fascinated by the superimposition of her dry, incisive touch on the tale of swashbuckling adventure she tells in Beethoven’s mighty Emperor concerto.
Legacy (2/5)
In her later years, Long’s reputation as a teacher surpassed her fame as a concert artist, and she instructed a number of moderately well-known next-generation French pianists—Samson François, Philippe Entremont, and Jacques Févrieramong them. However, even her legacy as a teacher has largely faded from memory and tends to be overshadowed by the “school” of her contemporary Cortot. Most of her recordings, which were originally pressed by Columbia, were available for a while as reissues on LP, then on CD by EMI (now Warner Classics, which no doubt eliminated less mainstream recordings from its catalogue as bloated corporations tend to do), and later in a comprehensive four-CD set released on the French label Cascavelle that has been defunct for years now and can be difficult to find even on eBay. The brighter news is that the historical classical record label APR recently re-released the bulk of Long’s recordings, including all of her Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel and the vast majority of her Chopin (the only omission being, I’m sorry to say, her excellent second recording of the F minor concerto with Cluytens) as well as her d’Indy Symphony on a French Mountain Air. Here’s to hoping one or two more long-forgotten delights might resurface on a subsequent volume in this series.
