Don Satz commented on Masaaki Suzuki's playing of the aria in the Goldberg
Variations:

>Here, he displays a tendency for little hesitations which are slightly
>annoying; one magazine reviewer described it as "horizontal stretching".

That's a very strange phenomenon which I hear in many younger interpreters.
Maybe Horowitz started it (certainly when he does it it is at its ugliest)
- it's a kind of expressive 'leaning' at the beginnings or ends of runs,
an exaggerated stretching of large intervals, a series of agogic 'bulges'
all over the place.  I'm not sure I can describe it exactly, but I know it
when I hear it, and I'm allergic too it.  It sounds gushing and emotionally
pushy, or alternatively timid and lily-livered, or something - again, I
can't say exactly, but I hate it.  Listen to the phrasing of Landowska, or
Schnabel, or Hofmann before his decline, or Rachmaninoff, or Szigeti (or
Kempff, or Richter) - and you'll know what you're *not* hearing.  Their
cantilenas and musical shapes seem to me often more direct, with a sharper
and more confident outline, less fussily distended, than those of many
players today.

(Incidentally, getting back to a subject of some time ago, that's what I
was talking about when I said I didn't like Pires's and Perahia's Mozart -
the same lack of 'backbone')

Felix Delbruck
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