This unique four-disc
collection features the pianist Vladimir
Horowitz in recordings spanning 1928 through 1947, including performances of
Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn and more.
For much of his career, Vladimir Horowitz was
perhaps the most influential pianist in the world. He was an idol to several
generations of musicians (among them William Kapell, Vladimir Ashkenazy and
Murray Perahia), as well as to a huge general audience, which he fascinated with
dazzling pyrotechnics and an impeccably calibrated command of dynamics that
ranged from the most ethereal of pianissimos to a veritable Niagara of
sound. During the last 35 years of his life, despite ticket prices that
eventually climbed to $75 a head, Horowitz never played to an unsold seat.
The recordings gathered here represent the early Horowitz, the wild young Russian genius whose superbly controlled fury and all-but-superhuman velocity came as such a bracing shock when he burst forth upon the musical scene. Even Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the few composers who was generally the best interpreter of his own music, essentially turned over his vast Piano Concerto No. 3 to Horowitz after hearing what the younger man had done with it. And it is doubtful that anybody ever played the Liszt Sonata in B minor with such palpable, anxious urgency; after 70 years, this remains one of the most exciting records ever made.
Detractors sometimes claimed that Horowitz's first and foremost goal was to prove that he could do anything with a piano. In later years, to be sure, he was not always able to yoke his extraordinary acrobatics into linear statements, and the pieces he played sometimes turned into a succession of "vehicles" — the musical equivalent of weights to lift or hurdles to leap. Yet what is impressive about these early recordings (and the Liszt Sonata in particular) is the deeply organic quality of Horowitz's conceptions, the way every note, every measure, every phrase seems to grow inevitably from what came before. Here, the pianist's celebrated attributes — the prismatic colors, the thundering octaves and cascading scales, the eerily delicate, almost toy-like sound that he alone could summon — are combined with a welcome sense of formal rectitude.
Although he was best known for his interpretations of 19th-and early 20th-century music, Horowitz maintained a deep affinity for some earlier composers, notably Franz Joseph Haydn and Domenico Scarlatti, whose music he played with graceful fancy and a spine of steel. The pianist's way with Chopin was always a matter of taste: some thought his interpretations fussy and arbitrary, while others cherished him as "the last Romantic" and found in his digressions the manifestations of a grand and threatened tradition. Horowitz was generally more direct in the music of Mendelssohn, and the 1946 recording of the Variations sérieuses is among his best — tightly structured yet never wanting for poetry.
One of Horowitz's famous transcriptions, an appropriately "whiz-bang" version of Liszt's Wedding March and Variations after Mendelssohn, makes a happy complement to one of the pianist's early efforts as a composer, the Danse excentrique. The set is rounded out by Bach-Busoni, Beethoven, a rare sampling of Horowitz's Debussy and relatively unfamiliar works by Ernst von Dohnányi and Francis Poulenc, all rendered in inimitable fashion.
In the end, one finds oneself in agreement with the Musical America review of the pianist's first Carnegie Hall recital, which concluded: "Whether or not you agree with him, you have to pay attention when he plays. In other words, Mr. Horowitz is one of those not-so-common events — a distinctive personality." Yes, and never more so than in these electrifying early recordings.
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