Horowitz leads us a merry dance over the course of seventy-six
and a half incendiary minutes of pianism. The recordings were
made between 1949 and 1957 and there is a sizeable bonus in the
presenting of the 1949 recording of the F minor Ballade, soon
to be withdrawn. It was re-recorded in 1952. The transfers of
all these items are really first class.
These are Horowitz’s
first recorded thoughts on all these pieces. He re-recorded
them again – some in the 1960s, some in the 1980s. The biggest
work, the Sonata, for example was re-recorded in 1962 when
Horowitz took a radically different approach to the one he
adopted in 1950. He was never happy with the earlier recording,
especially – and rightly – about the first movement, which
he always acknowledged was difficult for him to bind together.
“My old recording was a little slow” he once said, “a little
stagnant.” He characterised the Scherzo as “Lisztian, Byronic
… like Bellini” and opined that the Funeral March was often
played with “soft, flabby rhythm.”.
The earlier recording
certainly was idiosyncratic. That first movement is distended
to a remarkable degree, especially for Horowitz, and it makes
objectively little structural sense. Further the Funeral March
is subject to exaggeration of dynamics and texture and the
finale rather nondescript, in terms of characterisation. It’s
a curiously unsatisfying traversal, pretty much eclipsed by
the more sensible approach to tempo relationships he adopted
in 1962.
The Barcarolle
is also typically Horowitzian and once again it fares poorly
when judged against his much later thoughts. By that later
time he’d stabilised important facets of interpretation; these
first thoughts lack expressive depth. The Polonaise-Fantaisie
in A flat major is driven through in 11:27 whereas in Carnegie
Hall in 1966 he took 13:19. The B minor Scherzo is full of
self-conscious bravado; intoxicating, to be sure, but tending
to ride roughshod over the body of the music. The two Ballade
performances really are exciting and there’s actually very
little to choose between them; they both have an epic quality
that compels the greatest interest, a torrid, sweeping, dynamic
vision.
These uneven performances,
often perplexing, sometimes simply unconvincing, are nevertheless
a repository of much magnificent pianism. One feels that Horowitz
perceived his structural responsibilities in Chopin more fully
only with the onset of the 1960s. But with the first class
transfers to tempt you, and that earlier Ballade, you might
want to augment those later statements with these more cavalier
earlier ones.
Jonathan
Woolf
Vladimir Horowitz
(piano) 
