Donald Satz <[log in to unmask]>  writes:

>Although no further recordings of the Goldbergs have fallen from the sky,
>I did buy a new reissue featuring Igor Kipnis...

...and goes on from there with his astoundingly industrious --and
valuable-- tour of classical recordings.  I've bought some of Don's past
recommendations--notably Tureck's stuff -- and my satisfaction with his
guidance is at the same time suffused with regret that there's simply not
the time to listen to everything else that he's commented on.

Another rub is that there seems to me lacking in Don's sense of things
a feel for the few great pianists who were perhaps not among the most
adept technicians but who could play arch-classical German music without a
foreign accent.  And you most decidedly didn't have to be German to bring
that off.  Among the artists I have in mind are, foremost, Serkin,Schnabel,
maybe Rubinstein, and in the latter day, Brendel.  These were/are players
who in our time continued in the tradition of play that the taste of the
Bildungsbuerger dictated --starting approximately with the entry upon the
aesthetic scene, in say Beethoven's time, of the highly educated bourgeois
and his displacement of the aristocrat as the arbiter of taste in music.
What came to be sought was a high-quality reading, rather than just
high-quality technique.  Among performers in my time I guess Landowska
might also fit into this taste mold, along with Barenboim--but I don't feel
that Tureck does, or Scott Ross, and certainly not Gould, or Pogorelich.
They're excellent, no doubt about that.  But they have that accent.

Denis Fodor