Josef Bulva

The Czech pianist (b. 1943) made some fantastic recordings (now out of print) before his career was tragically cut short in 1996 by an accident—he slipped on ice, mangling his left hand on broken glass.  According to the Josef Bulva Society, he (at least partly) recovered after 13 years, and gave a handful of concerts in 2009.

The same Society released a ridiculously expensive (EUR 220) 7-CD selection of his recordings, available on Amazon.de. The CDs are clumsily embedded in a huge (coffee table book size) book that won't fit into your bookshelf unless it is a gun cabinet. The book production is aptly slipshod (JPEG compression artifacts and pixelation in images, default system fonts, etc.), giving it a quaint Eastern European look and feel. Some of the recordings suffer from clipping and mediocre production (though some are decent), and the CD pressing quality is wanting. Less weight in paper and more recordings of the master of pedaling would have been better. Nevertheless, I recommend this triple-priced collection—much can be learned from this supremely meticulous musician. And If you manage to get a hold of his RCA Chopin recordings, you'll be set.

The tracklist is here. The book includes the run-of-the-mill biographical notes on the composers, two panegyrical pieces entitled "The Josef Bulva Phenomenon" (Guy Wagner) and "Aspects of Interpretation" (Ivan Parik) and an interview with Bulva (by Klaus Seidel).

Here is Bulva with Chopin's Scherzo no. 2 in from 1987 (not the Scherzo#2 recording of the aforementioned set). And here is the first movement of the 2nd Sonata, and the 3rd of Martinu's extraterrestrial Sonata. (All in mp3; here's foobar.)