Donald Satz replied to me:
>To me, a revelatory performance is one which brings to light one or more
>facets of a composition not found in other recordings. I listen to a
>performance and simply find new avenues in it. Sometimes it might be a
>"blinding flash" as in the Huggett version of the Sinfonia Concertante,
>sometimes an overall conception as with the Mosaiques.
I've thought some more about this question of revelatory recordings in the
sense of interpretations that are so potent that they can get you inside
pieces you didn't before like or understand. You're right, the 'blinding
flash' gave the wrong idea: if I think back to those listening experiences
which I now consider revelatory in hindsight, the fact is that they were
almost all so startling at first that for quite some time I was was ready
to dismiss them as ugly and wilful: Levy's Liszt and Beethoven op 111
sonatas, many of Arrau's interpretations, Hofmann's Chopin, Rachmaninoff's
Chopin b flat minor sonata and his own 3rd concerto. In each of these
cases there was no blinding flash at all: I had to really 'work' at these
interpretations until I discovered the musical logic and thought contained
within them. They were revelatory in the sense that in the process they
taught me a great deal about the works themselves and raised them in my
estimation.
What I therefore really meant by 'revelatory recordings' are those
which are unorthodox enough to unsettle your ingrainded assumptions while
sticking close enough to the implications of the notes to reveal valid, and
in the case of the recordings I mentioned above, deeply insightful things
about the music itself.
Another thought here: it really has little to do intrinsically with
an excentric approach to the score. 70 years ago Schnabel was just as
'revelatory' in my sense as Rachmaninoff is to me today because with his
new faithfulness to the score, he challenged the paradigm of a generation
that had been used, from all but the greatest interpreters, to lightweight,
sub-Lizstian Beethoven and taught them radically new things about the
composer. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau did the same thing with Schubert.
The problem is that we now have had generations of 'sub-Schnabelian'
interpreters, and we are once again stuck within a new, this time literal
tradition which shuts off other sides to a work. This is the reason why I
can't consider your Mozart suggestions 'revelatory' in the specific sense
I have outlined: they are all illuminating and different within those
boundaries, but they are fundamentally too orthodox to give blinkered
Mozart-haters like Bob Draper a radically different impression from the
recordings that have already formed or confirmed their opinions (but please
give counter-examples if I am wrong!). I riskily include HIP Mozart in
that judgment, because as I said in an earlier post, when HIPsters play
Mozart and Beethoven, they seem to me to combine old instruments and
techniques with the familiar Toscanini-Brendel approach. We need someone
who can dig without false scruples below the surface of the score and
present what they discover as vividly as possible, without at the same
time 'upsetting the balance' of Mozart's style. Of course, that's an
extraordinarily difficult thing to do, which is why I think it's unlikely
that there are any truly 'challenging' Mozart recordings out there.
One person who may have met my criteria is Busoni in his performances of
Mozart concertos in the early 1920's - which of course aren't on record.
They are supposed to have been exotic in the extreme, but wonderfully
transparent and with unparalleled drama and rythmic vitality. Even puritan
Arrau admired them, and Horszowski, if I remember correctly, considered
them by far the greatest Mozart performances he had ever heard.
Felix Delbruck
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