Classical music thread welcoming your suggestions and why...

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.»

My piano teacher was just recommending a Nyir….recording yesterday.  He then started giving me a brief bio of the performer.  I was thinking what are the chances that two people in my orbit would be extolling him a few days apart.   In the late 1970s I worked in a record store in Ann Arbor, Mi and I remember that one of his releases was in demand, particularly with the mMusic School faculty