Shura Cherkassky was introduced to Nimbus by Wilfred Stiff, then a director of the London agent Ibbs & Tillett. Wilfred recognised a young label pushing ahead fast at the transition point between LP and CD, one with a fondness for artists whose careers were waning. Accordingly, he dispatched one of his most prestigious names to the Nimbus Studio. Cherkassky was at that time acknowledged as one of the ‘great’ generation whose undoubted king was Horowitz, but after a long, notable career that began in his mid-teens, his popularity in the concert hall and recording studio had fallen. Shura’s late career was in need of a final boost.

Cherkassy’s first visit lasted four days - 31 January to 3 February 1981, the results of that session were released on LP, but never on CD. They are once again available in Volume 1 of this series (NI7112). For this second session once again he stayed in the big house, having taken one look at Monmouth’s finest hotel - The King’s Head - and declared ‘Oh no, I won’t be happy here!’. The studio and piano, a 1969 Hamburg Steinway, were set up as before. It was a studio so completely unlike the characterless spaces he had famously grown to decry. Here there was no sterile barrier to his inspiration. The grand Victorian reception room at Wyastone Leys served as a spectacular performance space, its full-height windows framing commanding views down the Wye Valley. Shura loved it, signing a copy of his Pictures at an Exhibition LP, ‘To everyone in Nimbus with love and the most wonderful feeling of inspiration’.

Nimbus ‘Rediscovered Recordings’
Nimbus is pleased to present a  series of recordings sitting on the shelves of the Nimbus archive that were ‘rediscovered’ during the 2020 COVID shutdowns. In those quiet days idle hands and minds posed the question: ‘So, do we have anything unissued that we can use to construct a release programme?’ This casual enquiry initiated a full investigation that has continued for five years and revealed more than fifty recording projects that, for one reason or another, never made it into the world. Some of these recordings go back to the founding of Nimbus in the late 1960s. There is no single reason to account for their neglect, and in every case we have found no justification for holding them back any longer.

The original analogue tapes, typically one-inch, four track, 30ips, transferred to a digital medium with no problem. We decided to archive them at 192k, thus preserving them for next generation use. Early digital tapes, from 1981/82, using U-matic cassettes, sometimes required surgical intervention to repair passages of lost signal, but having been stored in the same warm, dark room for their entire lives also transferred reliably for the most part.

‘He might be termed the last of the great individualists among the pianist fraternity, an artist whose credo stems from his teacher, the great virtuoso Josef Hofmann. It is a school of personal quirk and technical brilliance that has seemed out of kilter with our era of po-faced accent on authenticity and perfect manners, all tending towards uniformity of execution... Nimbus is to be congratulated for taking charge of Cherkassky during the 1980s and offering him the company’s Welsh headquarters to record in at will on his own time scale. As a result of long takes and pleasant surroundings in which Cherkassky thrives, this collection is truly representative of a player who hasn’t always had his due.’ - The Daily Telegraph 1999 on the release of box set NI1733 (Shura Cherkassky - The Nimbus Recordings)