Reviews
"Perlemuter plays the Etudes with the grace accorded to old friends."
Stereophile
Perlemuter’s Chopin represents by far the most extensive part of his Nimbus discography. It’s also the repertoire by which, one assumes, posterity will best remember him, though my own view is that his Ravel recordings are in a way more candid evidence of his musicianship, and were, moreover, made earlier so better preserve his virtuosic and digitally elevated musicianship at its late peak. There are individual Chopin discs, and a 6 CD boxed set which consolidates all his recordings for the company. His Etudes vary in tempo decisions. The first two of the Op.10 set are quite deliberate whereas the third, in E, is up to tempo, its contrary motion octaves dispatched with authority. There is an unhurried nobility about the fifth, though No.7 can seem somewhat impersonal. The Op.25 set sports a finely poetic A flat, and a direct, affecting (within his limits) C sharp minor. There’s marvellous pointing and a sense of colour in the – again – deliberately phrased G flat.
Jonathan Woolf, Musicweb-international.com