Pianists play music from their own country the best?

[cuberdrift]

I'm not completely sure, but this strikes me sometimes. Well-known pianists seem to be often recognizable by their interpretations of works of their own native country, or rather their best performances are from composers of their own nationality. We have Polish Rubinstein for Chopin, German Kempff for Beethoven, Austrian Walter Klein for Mozart and Schubert, Hungarian Cziffra for Liszt, Russian Horowitz for Rachmaninoff, and others I don't remember.

Interesting isn't it? Correct me if I'm wrong...just curious.

[worov]

Alicia de Larrocha for Spanish music.

Now, did Claudio Arrau performed some Chilean composers ?

[pianist1976]

Not necessarily. American Van Cliburn played the Russian repertoire as if he was a Russian, also Byron Janis (of course they excelled on a lot of more music styles). Chilean Claudio Arrau played astonishing renditions of Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt (or whatever he played). Japanese Uchida plays exquisitely Mozart and Debussy. Ukrainian Horowitz... well, is Horowitz. He played the Russians marvelously but also composers far from that location (Scarlatti, Clementi, Chopin, that sublime Mozart...). Cuban Bolet created a delicate and deep new point of view about Liszt. American Rosalyn Tureck was wonderful on Bach. French Cortot made unbelievable interpretations of Chopin and Schumann. And so on...

While it its true that Kempff or Brendel have magnificent versions of German and Austrian composers, I don't think that been of the same nationality than the composer (or of a close country) is a guaranty of nothing.

At the opposite I listened both terrible and good renditions of Chopin music by polish pianists, awful renditions of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev by Russians and so on.