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Rosen



The Rosen article in the New York Review that has been discussed already several times is worth looking at for many reasons.  I found the discussion on what exactly "touch" means quite enlightening.  But some of Rosen's ideas might also explain why Gould's fame seems to continue to increase while so many of his contemporaries seem to be becoming forgotten.  Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that Gould and Horowitz were the two titans of North American pinao playing in mid-century and that Horowitz is being relegated to the museum whereas  Gould continues to live.  The reason, I think, is that Gould gave up performing in public for good and thus concentrated on recording performances that would be valued for their sound and not the theatrics of the performance.  Rosen, a pianist himself, accepts that piano playing is theatrical, a sport, with a high visual element to it.  He claims that people used to stand up to watch Horowitz play the thundering parallel octaves of Liszt and company and that pianists get very physically involved with their playing.  I've never been ashamed to admit that attending a live performance is something like going to a circus--will the tenor hit the high C? will the pianist navigate a diffcult passage?  I once saw Hollander perform the Gershwin piano concerto and at the end of the first movement I marvelled that the piano had not been reduced to a smoking ruin.  It was spectactular and like most others in the audience it seemed that there was nothing to do but applaud the first movement performance (it really goes against all instincts not to aplaud after the first movement of Tchaikovsky's first as well).  Horowitz specialized in the spectacular and kept his audience by periodically making comebacks.  But 10 years after his passing, he is a museum piece.  Pletnev, for one, has more than compensated for Horowitz' passing.  But Gould built his reputation not on the visual spectacle, but on thoughtful performances which challenge us continually to this day.  His interest in technology also ensured that his recording sound was always of the best quality (although obviously most of the credit here belongs to the CBS producers and engineers) and transferred well to CD.
    I have been listening to quite a few of the Great Pianists artists and Gould really does stand out among many of them for, of all things, the subtelty of his dynamics.  For reasons Rosen explains, Gould did not excel at tonal colour (because he disliked the padal so much), but what comes as a surprise is the dynamic variations, which seem to me to be unique.  For many artists there is fff and ppp, but Gould operated at all levels in between.
    Rosen makes one unfair comment.  He refers to a rumour that one performance of the Liszt sonata has the pianist playing the right hand part with both hands while her husband played the left hand part (during the thundering parallel octaves).   This sounds as if it must have been Argerich.  Can anyone suggest who else it might have been? If it was not Argerich, it is rather unkind of Rosen to mention it as she is the most likely candidate.
        Allan