Graffman boxed set reflects a gentlemanly career

When Gary Graffman was director of the Curtis Institute of Music, he used to tell students that the recorded legacy was a distortion. The act of saving some recordings and discarding others - the natural selection of that business - means that all available evidence is not necessarily an accurate portrait of the artist.

That might not apply in Graffman's own case. On his 85th birthday, he is getting a gift from Sony Classical: a 24-CD boxed set of recordings from the 1950s on. I can't say for sure, not having been alive during the late-mid-century shank of Graffman's career, but based on his performances during the last 25 years, it seems the pianist you hear in these testaments - Rachmaninoff from 1964, Schubert from 1956 - is unshakably true to form. He is rock-solid, loyal to the composer, and uninterested in drawing attention to himself. In other words, Graffman could not be more different from his most eccentric pianistic progeny, Lang Lang.

Graffman's local admirers who heard him during the two decades, ending in 2006, that he spent bringing Curtis into the 21st century came to know a pianist who was different in one significant way: He was by then essentially a left-hand pianist, having injured his right hand (resulting in focal dystonia) in the late 1970s. His Curtis directorship was dotted with performances of left-hand works by Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

But there was a time when Graffman had a major career, and although some RCA and Columbia recordings in this set have been previously released digitally, considering them as a group emphasizes the scale of a career cut short, and the injustice of it. Here the recorded legacy bestows not a distortive, but a restorative quality. (At about $60, the set is also risk-free.)

You will never be put off by Graffman, as some were by one of his Curtis predecessors, Rudolf Serkin. Graffman is a gentleman - not unadventurous in his own way, but controlled, within bounds. It's a compelling balance, though. He is objective without being cool. If you want to hear a Schubert "Wanderer" Fantasy that uses time as an element to be toyed with, then seek magicians like Vassily Primakov, Mitsuko Uchida, and Rudolf Buchbinder. Graffman is a truth-teller, which means explaining the exact time value of every note.

But Graffman - who still teaches at Curtis - played well with others, even striking up collaborations with artists who might seem philosophically opposed. Leonard Bernstein pulls a saturated sound from the New York Philharmonic in Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, and Graffman isn't cowed. He dominates without a trace of harshness, and, in handling the kind of elasticity that the composer allows, Graffman and Bernstein reach a happy middle ground. In Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Chicago Symphony and undervalued American conductor Walter Hendl, Graffman finds the unsentimental, the momentum, the judiciousness of quiet.

Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are surprisingly explosive in Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1. They give the first movement one of those openings that makes you feel as if an entire story has played out before the soloist even begins; and then Graffman enters baring teeth. It goes on like that, considerably more wild and unsettled than anyone might expect from Graffman, and it's a glorious thing. At the finale of the last movement, Graffman races ahead, defying his reputed reserve.

Piano concertos, chamber music, sonatas and other solo work make appearances: Debussy and Faure violin sonatas with Graffman and violinist Berl Senofsky; Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff solo piano pieces.

The last CD in the set is Graffman playing Rhapsody in Blue with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, along with additional Gershwin turns from the soundtrack of Woody Allen's Manhattan. On the classical-pop spectrum, this is a piece that can withstand all kinds of takes. Graffman, though, can't hide his pedigree, and it's a fairly proper performance. He may be a lifelong New Yorker, but he arrived at Curtis at age 7. Musically, you just can't take the Philadelphia out of the boy.

215-854-5611