This disc is the 2nd in a series of newly released live performances taken from private recordings that Vladimir Horowitz donated to the Yale University Music Library.  The program consists of two works that are considered to be musically profound: the Schumann Fantasy and the Chopin Barcarolle, and two showpieces: Balakirev’s “Islamey,” and Liszt’s Legend No. 2, St. Francis Walking on the Waves, recorded between 1946 and 1950.  These are the 1st recordings ever released of Horowitz playing the Balakirev and the Liszt, music for which he was brilliantly suited, and they are as exciting as you would expect.  Readers should be warned that the source recordings had a great deal of noisy surface hiss, particularly in the Schumann and Chopin, some of which remains, but if one ignores it, there is actually a good deal of naturalness to the recorded sound of the piano.

The depth of the Schumann and Chopin works lies in the great variety of music that each contains and the range of emotions that they can stir.  Neither the sprawling 1st and 3rd movements of the Fantasy nor the Barcarolle follow a conventional form, so the interpretive challenge for the pianist is to make sense of their structure, pacing a performance in a way that clarifies the music’s progress for the listener.  Horowitz was a phenomenal pianist and at times, a wonderful musician, but I found these Schumann and Chopin performances more of interest for their pianistic display than their musical elucidation.

In the 1st 2 movements of the Schumann, Horowitz sometimes takes reckless speeds, and occasionally a casual approach to the notated rhythms.  This is a real problem in the 2nd movement, a march whose momentum depends on the accuracy of its repeated dotted rhythms.  He has a habit of tapering his sound to a whispery pianissmo in the middle of a phrase impeding the musical line with a kind of musical swoon.  By doing this in the very 1st phrase of the 1st movement, the chance of creating some sort of special nuance or color change at the end of the 2nd phrase, where an unexpected harmonic twist invites it, is spoiled.  (Of course none of this is in the score, the 1st phrase is simply marked “forte”, the 2nd “piano”).  It also happens many times in the 3rd movement, preventing many simple singing lines from running their course.  Perhaps what we are hearing is Horowitz’s pianistic approximation of the very free singing style of the Italian baritone Mattia Batistini (1856 -1928), whom he revered and imitated, but it comes across as a disruptive mannerism that draws attention to the piano playing, not the music, or at least not its phrase structure.

Horowitz temporarily retired from giving concerts between 1953 and 1965.  His 1965 Carnegie Hall recital was issued as a Columbia record, “An Historic Return.”  It is still available on CD, and the Schumann Fantasy was featured on that program.  In 1965, Horowitz offered a downright Apollonian view of the piece.  The sense of impulsiveness (this wild, romantic music calls for it) is still there, but guided by a more logical conception than in 1946, minus the exhibitionism.  The structure of the 1st movement is clarified with clear dynamics that show where declamation ends and reverie begins.  The rhythm in the 2nd movement is rock solid and the 3rd movement has a lovely sense of repose, missing in 1946.  It seems that in his 12-year hiatus from performing, Horowitz grew tremendously as a musician.

His 1957 studio recording of the Chopin Barcarolle is a bit more restrained than this 1947 concert version, but in both performances I feel that he doesn’t fully identify with the lyrical character of this piece.  The average pianist struggles in the Barcarolle with its voicing, its double trills, and Chopin’s directions for subtle tempo changes in order to achieve, at least in some sections, the sense that this is a simple “boat song.”  Horowitz, who may have found its technical challenges not so difficult, revels in its harmonic complexity and contrapuntal richness, but somehow the quieter parts sound mannered and his idea of a big showy climax seems wrong.  This music resists fussiness – it has enough strangeness and twists and turns of its own, and its overall gentleness doesn’t take well to banging, but that’s what Horowitz does in the “big” section before the end.  Dinu Lipatti’s unaffected 1948 recording of the Barcarolle remains a model performance that combines all of the work’s elements into a coherent whole.

Balakirev’s Oriental Fantasy, “Islamey” – is there another piano work with a more politically incorrect title? – has the reputation of being the most technically difficult piece ever written.  Aside from a relaxed middle section, it consists of repeated statements of a jaunty melody in increasingly complex forms.  In 1950, Horowitz was easily up to the challenge of playing it, and his performance is rhythmically taut and swaggeringly aggressive.  The jumps, the speed, and its cumulative manic energy are astounding; it’s the best thing on the disc.

Liszt’s 2nd Legend is a bombastic setting of a banal melody dressed in the most varied and ingenious possible keyboard figurations to suggest a watery deluge.  Some of Liszt’s late music has a searching, spiritual quality; this piece does not: it’s a thrilling, if shallow showpiece.  In the 1940s, Horowitz continued the tradition of Liszt, Busoni, and Rachmaninoff by composing a number of brilliant piano transcriptions of familiar music such as Carmen and “The Stars and Stripes Forever”.  He also recomposed quite a few pieces in order to display his technique to the maximum and St. Francis is one of those.  Liszt would undoubtedly have approved.

A blurb on the back cover of the CD touts these performances as coming from the time when Horowitz was at his technical and musical peak.  In a purely athletic definition of technique, this is true, and it was probably the time of his greatest prominence in the American music scene, but his true musical peak was yet to come.  It was in the post-retirement phase of his career that he gave the world his witty, elegant take on Scarlatti and Clementi, wise and satisfying Haydn and Mozart, visionary readings of Scriabin’s sonatas, a revival of many neglected Schumann works, and much else.     

© 2009 Paul Orgel