Vladimir Horowitz Plays Liszt

An Angel re-recording of Liszt's sonata in B minor (COLH 72), carried out by the unbelievably agile fingers and arms of Vladimir Horowitz, has filled a huge hole in the record catalogue. The release is part of Angel's "Great recordings of the Century" series, and is taken from a 78 rpm recorded in 1932, when Horowitz was at his best. Though the stereo addict will wince at an occasional impurity in sound, Horowitz's performance is superb. The Angel version far surpasses the few recordings of Liszt's sonata available earlier.

The piece is one of Liszt's grandest, but it is dull in most performances. It is long and has no easily graped structure; apparently, a pianist with the technique and imagination of Horowitz is needed to tie its stretched out variations together.

Cramped by tradition, Liszt insisted on writing a full-length sonata without sonata form, without movements, and with no more than a bare minimum of thematic material. The stuff of his piece is virtually over in the first fifteen measures: the introduction, a meditative, decending scale in the piano's lower registers, then the main theme, crashing, acrobatic octaves followed by a tiny march, again down low.

These themes appear in every conceivable mood during the sonata. The leaping octaves turn into a simple song, the march is played at half speed, decorated with trills, and, near the end, the two halves of the main theme are juxtaposed in a fugue. Of the four or five pianists I've heard perform this work, Horowitz is the only one who masters Liszt's runs of octaves and sixths enough to make the composer's intentions clear throughout. No matter how intricate the notes on top are, the lower levels are never blurred. In Liszt's day, probably, it was fashionable to play the piece with less precision, but Horowitz's precision is not wooden. He makes liberal use of rubato, and he has so much control of tempo and volume that he can build up phrases spanning large segments of the soata.

Four Schumann Pieces

Not to be overlooked on the Angel record are four short pieces by Schumann on side two, all recorded by Horowitz on the thirties. They are: "Toccata," "Arabesque," "Traumes Wirren," (from the "Phantasiestueke") and "Presto Passionato."

The "Toccata," on paper, looks like a five-finger exercise. Schumann wrote it when he still hoped to be a virtuoso, and proudly claimed it was one of the most difficult pieces ever written for piano. Horowitz, of course, reduces the difficulties of a "semi-quaver" to nothing, and brings out the smooth melody. As for "Arabesque," I heard it for the first time, and wished it were recorded more often. My delight was only slightly lessened when I read the record jacket, which said the piece contained two imaginary characters--the bold Florestan and the tender Eusebius--who represented the duality of Schumann's personality.