Donal: What lies behind this divergence? Reasonable disagreements as to where artistic value lies? Unreasonable ones?
Eric: Of many possible answers, the foremost is that risk-averse playing is a mark of contemporary culture. If you compare the playing of so-called romantic pianists -- like Emil von Sauer, Moriz Rosenthal, Josef Lhévinne, Alfred Cortot, Sergei Rachmaninoff, even Vladimir Horowitz -- to moderns like Emanuel Ax or Mitsoku Uchida, you'll see the former took a lot more liberty with the score. They add rubato, ornaments, disregard tempi markings. (One of the most famous examples is Rachmaninoff's recording of the Chopin Second Sonata, where he adds octaves and extra chords to make the piece, for him, sound better. Another is Horowitz's adaptation of Pictures at an Exhibition.) It was expected of them. It was part of their musical culture. They improvised more in concert and had more freedom to be idiosyncratic. Von Sauer would smooth pieces to a veneer; Rachmaninoff would bring an operatic touch even to his transcriptions of Bach. Yet for an audience to dwell on a fingerfault, such as Cortot sometimes has in his Chopin recordings would have been thought boorish and Philistine, like criticizing the cracks in a Vermeer. Risk taking was valued.
Furthermore, early recordings did not allow editing. All acoustic or early electrical recordings are, in a sense, live recordings.
The later Soviet pianists like Richter and Gilels had a different approach: pure score, no cult of personality. If a piece called for a repeat, it would always be there. Yet they were both great risk-takers in concert and produced much more spectacular and profound interpretations than contemporary pianists. Richter's live recording of Pictures at an Exhibition (exactly as written unlike Horowitz's) has a bunch of mistakes at the very beginning, yet the overall performance is still the canonical recording and one of the most breath-taking examples of superhuman musicianship yet produced. Same can be said of his live recording of the Appassionata or Prokofiev Eighth Sonata.
The second cultural involution comes from two interrelated factors: contemporary musical conservatory training and the modern audience's overfamiliarity with music via recordings. Just as people mistake speed for intelligence, teachers and audiences mistake note-perfect readings for artistic renderings. Granted most musicians know that a note-perfect rendering is merely the product of a keen nervous system at a certain point in time, while an artistic rendering is the result of imaginative feeling and thinking through the score ... still conservatory teachers feel their audiences are too much on the surface of music to ignore a mistake. So if the score reads prestissimo, it is to be played not as rapidly as possible, but as rapidly as possible with perfect notes ... never mind if the attack is wrong or the spirit of the music is lost.
Donal: Do commercial pressures underpin risk-averse performances, particularly with recordings?
Certainly! (See above.) That's why risk-taking is discouraged. Pianists and orchestras usually tour with a series of works before recording them. So unless they are already golden artists, they have to produce consistently acceptable reviews to get the contract for a recording.
Donal: I'm not likely to buy a second version of most pieces (only once have I gone mad and simultaneously bought five versions of the Goldberg Variations) so how can I second-guess the books, especially given that nearly all the recommendations have some kind of excellence?
I never resort to guides. Don't own any. If you have a good library, you can borrow versions and compare. The Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library (right next to the Met Opera) has a huge collection and, stateside, one can borrow recordings from any library via interlibrary loan. You Brits probably have even wider resources.
Plus you get to know performers. If you dislike Andras Schiff, you'll know what his Goldberg Variations are like; you'll know that Alexis Weisenberg's GV is likely to be rapid, heavily pedaled, and eccentric. You'll know what to expect from Angela Hewitt or Vladimir Feltsman.
------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
