Re: GG: Rosen on GG and Horowitz; Dubal

[John Hill <jphill@home.com>]

Bradley P Lehman wrote:
> 
> Wait...yer sayin' ye got a Rubsam WTC?  Tell me more!  I didn't know he'd
> done those yet....  Ah, unless it's those early versions on the Friedemann
> Notebook disc.

Yep, it's the Friedemann disc, with the mix of different pieces on it.
I looked for a WTC disc and didn't find any.  BTW, some of the WTC items
have different passages or truncated endings.  Did he unearth some different
editions of those pieces?  Those always sound surprising to me.

> Another nicely Gumby type of Bach player is J-Carlos Martins.  The
> Dionysus to GG's Apollo, or Eusebius to Florestan.

"Gumby", Brad?
Gumby = Dionysus,  Pokey = Apollo??
I have a miniature set of Stan & Cartman, but I must have misplaced
my Gumby & Pokey action figures!

> I was a little surprised by his opinion, too, until remembering that
> Sandor's known at least as well as a pedagogue as as a performer.  He's
> probably so accustomed to crystallizing his wisdom into nicely teachable
> sayings such as this....  I don't find his own recordings of Bartok bland
> at all.

True.  They were pretty percussive, as I recall.  Maybe he *did* manage to
crap out some microphones.

> It's a continuum.  There's a lot to be said for the bending and
> italicization that one does instinctively in response to live listeners as
> they contribute attention.  It's a positive feedback loop.  (Anthony
> Rooley's book _Performance: Revealing the Orpheus Within_ is fantastic
> along these lines...but annoyingly it's out of print!)  When there's no
> audience present the performance tends to be more objective (in my
> experience anyway) and the recorded result is less interesting to listen
> to.  A live performance when it's going well is closer to at-the-moment
> creativity, and that shows up on the tape as a positive feature (even if
> in hindsight some of the choices turn out to be questionable).

That's a good point.  But (being a recording guy) I'm gonna side with
GG's preference for the inherent "take-twoness" of the studio experience
and the ability to actually juxtapose two (or more) completely different
approaches and create something that could never happen in a live
setting.  Also, in live settings you have all that other guck to deal with
like noisy A/C, people with candy wrappers, people with Whooping Cough,
people restraining fussy children, etc. etc.   And GG makes the point that the
live experience often doesn't offer the chance for the artist to really put her/his
best foot forward, contemplatively speaking.

> Was it Barenboim whose philosophy is to do two whole takes of a piece and
> that's it, trusting that intercuts between the two can build something
> even greater than either one?

Don't know about Barenboim.  Certainly this was the case with acoustic jazz
artists.  Monk rarely did more than three takes.  I remember Charlie Rouse
commenting that "if you played wrong notes on more than one take, that was
it.....you were just going to have to live with that every time you heard the
recording".  And they rarely intercut anything.  Of course, that music was *all
about* the moment.
 
> Yup.  After writing this afternoon I put on the Hindemith brass sonatas
> and marveled again at GG's clarity.

I played both parts of the trumpet sonata (OK, *attempted* the trp. part)
at different times during my undergrad degree.  That recording was
an important roadmap and still resonates deeply for me.  I think we actually
got the 4/4 and 12/8 overlay in the last movement right once or twice!
It's a great piece...

cheers,
jh