Complete Decca Recordings (26CD Box Set)

Collected for the first time in one set are Jorge Bolet’s complete Decca recordings.

Included is the first-ever release of Bolet’s last recording, a selection of Chopin’s Nocturnes and the Berceuse, recorded just seven months before his death.

When Jorge Bolet died in October 1990 the world lost one of its last ‘great Romantics’. Spirituality, a luxuriant tonal palette, a real sense of architecture, breadth, grandeur, all allied to a prodigious technique – these were just some of the qualities that informed his playing. Now, for the first time, Decca collects all the recordings he made for the label, from 1977 to 1990. Released for the first time and included in this set, is his last recording, a selection of Chopin’s Nocturnes and the Berceuse, recorded just seven months before his death.

Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1914, Bolet was the fifth of six children. Showing an early aptitude for the piano, Bolet was able, through private funding as well as pure serendipity (something that informed several key moments in his professional life), to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with David Saperton, who also taught Shura Cherkassky, Abbey Simon and the young Julius Katchen. Saperton was the son-in-law of Leopold Godowsky and later, Bolet took lessons with him.

When it came to recordings, Bolet was less lucky than many of his peers. Part of the reason was the pianist’s own dislike of the recording studio. He found the stimulus of a ‘live’ audience much more to his taste. His earliest recordings were for smaller labels, including Remington and Boston Records. In the early 1970s he recorded for RCA and Columbia (CBS) as well as smaller labels like Genesis, Colosseum and Ensayo. But it wasn’t until he was in his 60s that he came to Decca, where he experienced the Indian Summer of his recording life, remaining with the label to the end.

Key among his projects for the label was a sequence of Liszt recordings, described by Gramophone as ‘an indispensable series’. Undeniable is his stamp on the original Liszt works, but have the transcriptions of the Schubert lieder ever taken wing like they do in these interpretations? He also recorded concertos by Grieg, Chopin, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff as well as solo works by the last three aforementioned. On 26 and 27 February 1990 he went into Davies Hall in San Francisco to record a group of Chopin Nocturnes and the Berceuse. But his health had begun to decline in 1988 (he was diagnosed as HIV positive in December 1988) and, in 1989, he underwent a brain operation from which he never fully recovered. He died in October 1990, at his home in Mountain View, California.