"Horowitz has recently gained a good renown. He has extraordinary octaves”. This is Rachmaninov opinion about Vladimir Horowitz (1904-1989), in a letter dating to 1936, an important document for the expressions of appreciation towards one of the main piano virtuoso of the Twentieth century, expressions by the way belonging to another heir of the Nineteenth century virtuosity. Horowitz had studied in Russia with Felix Blumenfeld, a pianist and conductor belonging to the great romantic tradition, and who therefore formed him according to such tradition, permeated of the grand virtuoso legacy.
Horowitz became at first very famous in the Soviet Union, after a series of 23 concerts he gave in Leningrad in 1924, where he performed a repertory including more than two hundred pieces. He afterwards went on a European tour, then he made his debut in the United States, at the Carnegie Hall in New York, where he performed Tchaikovsky First Piano Concert.
But what Horowitz loved to consider his real debut in the States was his meeting with Rachmaninov, with whom he had a deep artistic mutual understanding. The performance, in 1928, of Rachmaninov Third Concert - that Rachmaninov had had in his repertory for the past sixteen years - hallowed his fame of virtuoso. The years between his American debut and 1936 stand as the first successful period in the long career of the Russian pianist, and the many recordings of this period stand to prove his prodigious technique. In 1933 Horowitz marries Wanda Toscanini, the daughter of the famous Italian conductor. Between 1936 and 1939 his career was interrupted for health reasons, but from 1939 to 1953 his activity is again uninterrupted and feverish.
With the outbreak of Second World War, he and his wife settled in the States, and obtain American citizenship. In this period, he gives many public concerts, and records unforgettable performances, among which those included in this CD. Since 1953, he retired from the scene, but continued with the recordings. Therefore, his concert at the Carnegie Hall in 1965 was a kind of surprising event. By that time, he had anyhow acquired the status of a living legend, and his rentrée cleared every doubt about his technical conditions. Until 1987, two years before his death, he took on many public performances.
Horowitz pianism is clearly derived from the romantic season, with particular regards to its virtuoso and, in a certain sense, demoniac aspects. Despite of this, his interpretations are never flat and superficial, as we would expect as a legacy of a brilliant and exterior virtuosity. On the contrary, Horowitz uses his extraordinary technique to give to music the breath of a total expressiveness, sometimes brought to its extreme consequences (at times exaggerated), where virtuosity becomes a challenge to the physical possibilities of the instrument itself. His repertory, even if extremely wide, is focused on the composers of the Romantic season, such as Liszt (particularly sympathetic to him), Chopin, Schumann, and a few others of the Twentieth Century, such as, of course, Rachmaninov, and Scriabin, whose music, by the way, owes to Horowitz much of its popularity in the Western culture. |
