Re: Fw: Re: Gould vrs Horowitz?

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

At 10:11 AM 4/27/01 -0700, Jim Morrison wrote:
> Wow.  I've said it many times, and I'll say it again.  The more you look
> into the sources, the more you check you facts, the more you compare
> stories, the more closely you look into these biographies the less factual
> and the more fictional they seem.  Reader beware.  These books should have
> warning labels.

Yeah, well, GG said his biography should be a work of fiction....


> Jim
>
> (Who happens to be a fan of Horowitz and suggests people listen to his
> Scriabin, Prokofiev, Barber, and Scarlatti before writing him off.)


Edmund Battersby in _Remembering Horowitz: 125 Pianists Recall a Legend_
edited by David Dubal:

(...) What is amazing about Horowitz is how very much of his playing
epitomizes principles that are simply truths when one plays the music of
the early, middle, and late nineteenth century on the instruments for which
it was composed.  Horowitz's seemingly infinite nuances, his separation of
voices, fast cut-offs, pedalling and non-pedalling, and exaggeration of
register (both in terms of sound and character) are hallmarks of _his_
style and form the tenets and discoveries of what is known today as
"performance practice" in regard to the piano.  Even Horowitz's thundering
and dramatic testing of the extent of the modern piano's capabilities
resembles a more miniature but exciting drama that takes place on the
limits of early pianos.  Could it be that Horowitz's aural memory of
instruments from the mid-nineteenth century affected him so?  It is
entirely within the realm of possibility that there were enough "old"
(thirty-five to fifty years old) pianos around when Horowitz began to
listen and play.  Whether it was conscious and unconscious is not important.

(...) Today one frequently hears praise of a new piano described in this
way.  "It's marvelous--no register breaks, just one even sound from top to
bottom."  For those of us who are delighted by the difference in registers
or the character that the hollowness between extreme treble and bass
strings can create on an early piano, this is faint praise.  Homogeneity
was not always so prized by many pianists and builders as it is today.  The
resulting soup can sound as if all the notes were put through a
food-processor!  But maybe it is a matter of taste.  The exciting part
about being alive at the end of the twentieth century is just how much
there is from which to choose and how really great the classics are, having
been put to every test imaginable.

(...) Arguably the most _questioning_ great pianist of our time who openly
and heroically wrestled with his uncomfortableness with twentieth-century
pianos for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music was Glenn
Gould.  Critics and musicians alike were amused and curious about Gould's
choice of piano and then his tampering with paper clips and tacks to create
a leaner, more austere sound in the Classical repertory.  One does wonder
why his instinct and genius did not lead him to the instruments of the
period (save the harpsichord and organ, both of which he played and
recorded on).

Gould's doctoring of modern pianos to create the sound he wanted seems more
artificial to me than either going right to the source (early pianos) or
dealing with the contemporary instrument in an imaginative way.  Horowitz,
on his beloved Steinway, proved that this instrument had the coloristic
abilities for any music of any century.  Listen to Horowitz's Scarlatti,
which has a myriad of colors under mezzopiano, coaxed out by this
musician-magician as if his finger sensitivity was the result of clavichord
playing.  Many other performances reveal every line's independence, as
Loesser has described.

When the truths and the excesses of the period instrument/performance
practice movement are gradually sorted out, what will remain is the fact
that transparency and independence of voices is the rule to be cherished
from Scarlatti and Mozart through Schumann and Chopin, and that every note
and every line has its own context, beauty, character, and
relationship.  While this can be learned from serious compositional study,
or from deep examination of the string quartet or the great choral
literature, a pianist must, in the last analysis, return to his own
instrument.  Horowitz is still the master and guardian of this truth, and
for many players of old and new pianos he will have been the most
persuasive in confronting and often solving the dilemmas of translating the
great classics on the instrument of our time.

</battersby>


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
clavichord CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl
trumpet and organ: http://www.mp3.com/hlduo

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot