Classical music thread welcoming your suggestions and why...

Here a very humoristic video of Rubinstein called :

"Arthur Rubinstein being Arthur Rubinstein for 8 minutes straight":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPrXRzw0KU4

I never had never reservation or frustration to listen to him...

In the last minute of this video you will see why this man is a great soul...

I am very picky with pianists...very difficult... Because i love piano... My god is named Scriabin... Rubinstein is not a Scriabinian for sure...

But this master can play Scriabin with a mastery of colours existing only in the Russian school...And his playing sing without never being mere  "perfection " ...

I dislike crystalline perfection on piano without the soul singing ...

Because as said the famous french poet, René Char : "imperfection is the peak of the mountain "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSti8gu1VCc

Scriabin has always impressed me for his color.  He was vey interested in synesthesia, the pairing of visual colors and tones.  It can be heard to isolate the contours of his work, as it isn’t as driven by the traditional type of sonata form, with the usual ideas concerning development of thematic material.  My favorite Scriabin Piano Sonatas impress more for their musical pointillism, like a Serraut canvass.  All those beautiful musical colors, metaphorically turning in the wind.  It’s fascinating to hear the same piece played by Pianists as different as Horowitz and John Ogden.  Horowitz is like a black and white photograph taken by a master photographer that seems to play with light to achieve multiple shadings of grey.  Ogden plays with the colors more.  It’s hard to recognize that they can be playing the same work.

  I think that your comments about Furtwangler and my previous are discussing the same phenomenon, but here since I am talking about Pianistic color, let me discuss Furtwangler’s use of color.  It’s a pity that he died on the cusp of the stereo era, but he built his sound from the ground up.  Double basses, cellos, low brass all lay a rock solid foundation of sound.  Then within that supple phrasing that we have been referencing he could draw contrasting sounds that were part of the magic, because different choirs of instruments would phrase organically around that firm , enveloping scaffold

I concur with all your observations...

I thank you very much for all your posts and interesting reading...

I did not discovered Scriabin with Ogden nor Horowitz,,,

But Ogdon is very much more to my taste ...

But perfection about colors is not the only difficulty in Scriabin playing ...

The harder task after complete colors control is intensity, the playing must not be MERELY BEAUTIFUL, but trance like and hypnotic.... Scriabin as you know was not only a synesthetes but was a seer who use his art to seize the listener and put it out of his body... I learned to listen to Scriabin with Sofronistky, Zhukov, Neuhaus and many others unknown in the east from the Russian piano school...

( Ogdon a very great pianist is my best by far in Sorabji Clavicem Ballisticum where is more controlled mastery with intensity is there a more perfect match with the composer Sorabji , Scriabin unlike Sorabji does not CONTROL himself completely but let go of everything and immersed himself in a cosmic sea, an experience which is nowhere in the works of the completely cerebral genius Sorabji who i admire)

For example the great version of Michael Ponti which i like a lot in spite of his atrocious sound recording, is not the way i will prefer for Scriabin interpretation at first , because Ponti plays it as delicious beautiful liitle pieces of colors, but his mastery of the playing with his spontaneous IMPROVISATION feeling as in one fell swoop with no back thought impress me a lot , which playings i listened nowhere as it is under his finger, make him my best version out of the Russian school ...It is a pity for the sound , it is almost the worst recording of piano i listened too with alas! many bad sound recordings by Sofronitsky ... But music is not sound...And Ponti is a very underestimated Pianist...

My best pianist of all time with Scriabin is Sofronitsky probably in second Zhukov and What we have from Neuhaus who for example give us a "toward the flame" rivaling Sofronitsky himself ...Neuhaus is a giant but verry few recording available in the east, he work as a teacher and stay in the shadow but i never listened to a combination of supreme esthetic playing with supreme intensity in so perfect balance by any pianists ... Even if Sofronitsky is my favorite pianist because of his Scriabin understanding without match ( except Neuhaus beside him ) , for the piano playing itself not only Scriabin interpretation i had no doubt that Neuhaus is God too as said Richter about Sofronitsky...

This except from french wikipedia about this anecdote is very true:

«Although Scriabin himself never heard Sofronitsky play, Scriabin’s wife claimed that the pianist was the most faithful performer in the spirit of her husband’s works. His recordings of Scriabin are seen by many as unsurpassed. Pianists Svyatoslav Richter and Emil Guilels considered Sofronitsky their master. One day when drunk Sofronitsky declared to Richter that the latter was a genius, Richter retorted that he was God.»

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slv09szFHkM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy8MTTrh-Z8

The Russian piano school is so powerful and with so unknown masters  that no other school even compare... Think about that in the same evening listening, before 1920 Sofronitsky, Simon Barrere, Maria Yudina, and  young Horowitz on the same piano...

Listen to Simon Barrere, about who Horowitz said Barrere could do more with one hand than most of us can do with two.  For an example of unknown  unique pianist :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na1sXWfHaIQ

Scriabin the successor of Liszt and Chopin must be played like this...

This is why i love Sofronitsky playing Scriabin because he play it the same way as Ervin N. in Liszt ...

I forgot to say that the Liszt Oberman valley by Nyiregyházi give us twenty minutes of duration ...( a few second less)

The Arrau version 15 minutes....

Can you imagine how a pianist can master each note in a so slow physical duration time compared to anyone ?

Kissin, Richter, Berman, all played around 14 and fifteen minutes...Horowitz 13 minutes... Volodos 13 minutes... Etc

it is IMPOSSIBLE to play at this slow tempo as Ervin N. do it without a complete mastery of the relation between chord and musical vertical time, not physical horizontal time...

And when we listen the piece as played by him, we NEVER feel it as slow, the powerful succession of notes is more a fall or/and an ascension than a simple walk...

Read the biography of this pianist who quit concert life at thirty five , because after the exploitation by his mother whom he abandon after his 16 th birthday to live alone he was managed by american impresario who seems to exploit him too much for his taste, he never practice, and never own a piano for decades, and came back at 70 years old to concert after 35 years absence ONLY to win money for the cancer cure of his tenth wife...But then he regain celebrity for the years till his death... When he played at his highest power, i cannot compare him to any other pianist ...Save Sofronitsky at his height in Scriabin ...

Amazing... now ... Am i a fool ?

Who listened to Ervin N. at the height of his maturity ?

Arnold Schoenberg himself who wrote a 3 pages letter to Klemperer about his playings and urge him to take a boat and come to listen this prodigy...

We cannot accuse the Faustian creator of atonal music to be an afficionado of pianists for the sake of their playings , they only serve him as slave working for him in a way... 😁 a man who think of himself as a Faustian genius as Thomas Mann depicted him do not become a groupie for a favorite pianist,... There is a SOLID reason...

Here from an article :

«We also have the testimony of Arnold Schoenberg. Arnold Schoenberg was not a man to suffer fools greatly. Nevertheless, the letter in which he wrote to Klemperer, Schoenberg lavishes praise on this pianist just about unlike any musician he had before encountered. Schoenberg’s own students were sometimes victims of their master’s caustic comments. He did not bestow praise lightly on anyone. However, he seems to be absolutely captivated by Nyiregyházi and his playing.»

Or this from an other article... Alas! i did not recover back the letter of Schoenberg which is very long and totally under the spell of Liszt interpretation by the 35 years old Ervin N.

«Arnold Schoenberg, for one, was bowled over. “Such power of expression I have never heard before,” he wrote to the conductor Otto Klemperer. And then follows three pages of Schoenberg’s analysis of Nyiregyhazi’s “incredible” playing.»