The Singular Horowitz Remembered, Warts and All
The New York Observer
October 2, 2003
by Charles Michener
The other day, Schuyler Chapin reminisced about the afternoon
of May 9, 1965, when he was standing backstage at Carnegie Hall
with Vladimir Horowitz. It was a "stinking hot Sunday," and the
legendary pianist was playing his first recital after a 12-year
absence from the public (a disappearance that remains unexplained
to this day). Horowitz arrived only minutes before the starting
time of 3:30, keeping everyone on tenterhooks about whether he
would actually show up. After a quick warm-up on a piano in the
dressing roomand a further warming of his hands between those
of a young Carnegie Hall employee who happened to be standing
nearby ("Mine were too cold," Chapin said)Horowitz finally made
it to the door of the auditorium, where nearly 3,000 people
waited.
"He stood there facing me," recalled Mr. Chapin, who had been
the pianists A&R man at Columbia Records and had agreed to serve
as his backstage valet. "I took him by the shoulders, turned
him 180 degrees and literally pushed him out onto the stage.
After he played the first piece [Busonis transcription of Bachs
Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major], his wife Wanda joined me,
her eyes filled with tears, mascara running. I never thought
Id live to see this day, she said."
I was one of the 3,000 waiting in the hall, and I leapt to my
feet, roaring along with everyone else, when that slim, dapper
figure in gray trousers and swallowtail coat materialized onstage.
Wearing the smile of an impish kid, he bowed to every corner of
the house. I felt my heart stop when, at the very opening of
the Toccata, he struck a crashingly wrong note, only to keep
going with an implacability that made the blood race. I shared
in the general relief when he wrapped up the Toccata with steely
gravity"He still had it!"and swept with magisterial verve into
Schumanns C major Fantasy. Then, in the coda of the second
movement, things went haywire. This time the missed notes
suggested a wrong turn from which there might be no way back.
But on he went, blurring his recovery with the pedal. After
pausing to wipe his face with a handkerchief, he traversed the
last, slow movement with transcendent serenity. From there,
through pieces by Scriabin, Chopin, Debussy and Moszkowski, we
were on the old Horowitz roller-coaster.
That concert sparked one of the most remarkable comebacks in
the annals of classical musica sporadic, unpredictable run that
made the pianists every appearance a news event and culminated
in his return, in 1986, to his native Russia, which hed fled
more than 60 years before. Heavily documented on video and CD,
those triumphant years lasted until Horowitzs death in 1989 at
86. They were also valedictory years, during which the pianist
was forever being labeled the last Romantic virtuoso. As a
younger generation of cooler-headed, more intellectual pianists
came to the foreamong them, Alfred Brendel, Maurizio Pollini,
Krystian Zimerman, Andrs Schiff and Mitsuko UchidaHorowitz came
to be regarded as a lovable dinosaur.
The truth, as demonstrated by an outpouring of Horowitz films
and CDs re-released in honor of the 100th anniversary of his
birth, is that he was that rare artist who sums up nothing but
himself. The most revealing of these documents is Sony Classicals
album Horowitz Live and Unedited, which is not a remastering of
Columbias best-selling record of the 1965 concert, but restitution
for what in its day was something of a fraud. Those of us who
actually heard the concert realized, when the purportedly "live"
recording came out, that the colossal boo-boos had mysteriously
disappeared. Horowitz, with the connivance of Columbias engineers,
had cleaned them up. Now, in a nod to truth in advertising
uncharacteristic of the music business, Sony has gone back to
the original tapes and reinstated the boo-boos. The old sorcerer,
warts and all, has never sounded more excitingly himself.
What astonishes most about Horowitz Live and Unedited is not the
fabled technical virtuosity that struck fear and trembling into
so many other pianists, but the immense range of expressiveness,
such that each note seems to have its own specific hue, each
phrase its own emotional weight. (It seems impossible that the
almost deranged thunderer of Chopins G minor Ballade could also
be the fleet-footed Puck of Moszkowskis tude No. 11 in A flat
major.) Moreover, the extravagant indulgence of that Matisse-like
palette and that Picasso-like nervous system, which inspired
Virgil Thomson to call Horowitz "a master of distortion and
exaggeration," had one uncomplicated aim: to excite the audiences
love of music by taking an unfettered delight in playing it.
Could it be that Horowitz was not an old-fashioned Romantic at
all, but the pianos great Modernist?
Pianists determined not to show anything like a human personality
in their playing (these are the people who agree a priori with
Michael Steinbergs wildly unfair verdict of Horowitz as an artist
who "illustrates that an astounding instrumental gift carried
no guarantee about musical understanding") should hie themselves
to the Walter Reade Theater, where the Film Society of Lincoln
Center is showing (from Oct. 1 to Oct. 3) Horowitz Plays 100.
Produced by the pianists manager, Peter Gelb, during and after
the last five years of Horowitzs life, this series of four
documentaries takes us into the elegant living room of the
pianists townhouse on Carnegie Hill, off Fifth Avenue, to a
studio in Milan where the pianist is recording Mozarts Piano
Concerto No. 23 in A major with the conductor Carlo Maria
Giulini, and into the Great Hall at the Moscow Conservatory.
The man we see is more than a great showman. He is a deadly
serious artist with an all-encompassing focus at the keyboard
that recalls the resolute image of his idol, Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Its mesmerizing to watch close up Horowitzs preternaturally long
fingers, with their oddly turned-up tips, maintaining a flat
position during tricky passages for maximum sound, striking all
parts of the keys to achieve maximum variety of tone. Only he
had that curious way of curling up the little finger of his right
hand during the fastest runs, saving it for a strategically
placed wake-up accent. "The most important thing," he explains,
"is to transform the piano from a percussive instrument into a
singing instrument. A singing tone is made up of shadows and
colors and contrasts. The secret lies mainly in the contrasts."
Never far away is his wife Wanda, whose life of subordination
to two great mercurial artistsher father was Toscaninidoesnt
show in her imposing presence. Part mother hen, part Madame
Defarge, she plays the long-suffering keeper with tart humor:
"I have nothing to say to you after 52 years," she snaps, looking
fondly at her mischievous husband. In Vladimir Horowitz: A
Reminiscence she goes through lovingly maintained scrapbooks
that show him as the wayward genius of a vibrant Jewish family
and, during his years as a young expatriate on the international
concert stage, a matinee idol with the sex appeal of Valentino.
Toward the end of Horowitz in Moscow, the pianist closes his
program with the farewell encore he played at his comeback recital
in 1965: Schumanns "Trumerei" ("Dreaming"). The camera pans
through the audience and, as Horowitz imbues the wistful melody
with an inexpressible tenderness, lingers on a listener whose
bulbous head and shock of white hair suggest that he might be a
high-ranking party apparatchik. His nose is red, and tears are
running down his cheeks. He's staring helplessly into the music.
Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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