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 rhythmic and dynamic '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 - 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 fussy and mannered, 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 Mozart - the same lack of 'backbone') Felix Delbruck [log in to unmask]