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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