These star-studded recordings represent a sizeable
chunk of Horowitz’s pitifully small legacy of concerto performances.
Off-air recordings of the second Brahms – from Lucerne in 1939 and a
1948 NBC broadcast – have swelled the discography but it’s still a small
return for so great a musician.
The performances on Naxos’s disc – from 1940-41 – have
their admirers but I’m not one of them. Nor it has to be said is sleeve-note
writer Ian Julier an admirer of the Brahms in particular. His notes
are forthright and honest in this respect and a welcome change. I wish
more writers were as critically informed. The Brahms is, to my ears,
a terrible performance. Julier notes the result to be "detached…brusque...reluctant
to engage in true dialogue…" and from its ridiculously over emphatic
first entry onwards I am in total agreement. I would add that the first
movement features some notably choppy rhythm, mechanical phrasing, both
perfunctory and indifferent; that Toscanini’s crisp phrase endings sound
more and more unpleasantly enervating; that Horowitz’s descending treble
run in this movement is so naughty as to be laughable; that the inflexibility
is endemic; that there are distinct tempo strains between soloist and
conductor; and also that the infamous lower frequency muddiness in the
bass still haunts the entire recording, despite the restoration.
In the second movement Toscanini is rhetorical and
gestural and Horowitz makes precisely nothing of the melting tune; I’ve
never heard playing less engaged and there is a cold metronomic malaise
over the whole movement. Even Frank Miller, doyen of cellists, sounds
constrained and withdrawn in his third movement solo – not unfeeling
just not much heart – doubtless the fault of a conductor and a soloist
who skate remorselessly over the surface of the music. The finale gives
off some heavy accents – albeit with some attractive, quiescent playing
– but what an air of sheer triviality hangs over the performance, what
remorseless mediocrity. The following year Fischer and Fürtwangler
were taped in a live recording of the concerto – fistfuls of wrong notes,
indifferent sound, but what a performance, what tangible, extraordinary
engagement, next to which Horowitz and Toscanini shrivel to almost total
insignificance.
The Tchaikovsky is better but it’s still not a reading
that I enjoyed. In fact by the end I had long since wearied of it. It
opens in overwrought, thunderous and hotheaded style – though there
is, as Julier says, much that is attractive – tremendous reserves of
intensity, colour and weight. There is also an occasional gracefulness
that comes as a welcome relief from the high-octane passion and frankly
all-too-often hysterical intensity of the reading as a whole. I think
it’s true to say that a performance of this kind does considerable damage
to the fabric of the concerto – listen to Rubinstein and Barbirolli
instead; a performance of real understanding.
Jonathan Woolf
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Vladimir Horowitz, piano