Classical music thread welcoming your suggestions and why...

Thanks for your post...

I cannot contradict you about Pollini... The search for perfection, when i feel it , kill for me the spontaneous playing imprevisible creation...

Pardon the thread drift, but say what you will about pianist Maurizio Pollini possessing more finger speed than soul, more often than not he’s my go-to guy when I want to hear some Chopin. Out and out exhilarating. I might have mentioned it in another thread, way back when, but I saw him perform live, once upon a time in L.A. Hair flying, reach-out-and-mow-down-the-stars virtuosity.

  I have been out of town for my mothers funeral so I haven't had a chance to keep up here.  I agree that Pollini and Moravec are two very different Debussy players.  Moravec has that warm buttery tone while Pollini has such fine etching and leonine strength.  The music however, can survive both approaches.  I prefer M.P. here, but for years the only recordings that I knew of the Debussy Preludes were those of Michelangelo, who was M.P. teacher.  Pollini very different Art does lead to equally exquisite poetry. 

   Barenboim has stated throughout his career that he wants to emulate Furtwangler.  He was the chief conductor here in Chicago for many years so I am very familiar with his work.  A recording that he made of Beethovens Third Piano Concerto, when he was a teenager and before discovering his Furtwangler Passion, was one of my earliest acquired ops.  Lets just say that D.B. has phenomenal natural musical instincts, but in attempting to superimpose the style of W.F., he frequently misfires.  He just doesn't seem to have that innate ability to convey his vision to others unless he slows things down to near stasis, but without the inner light that a Furt or Cell had, it just sounds slow and bloated

I wish you the best in these time of personal trials...

My sympathy for your mother lost...

I dont think that someone can imitate or be inspired by someone genius hoping to emulate him,... Each genius is unique...It is why Pollini is unique, liking him or not...

D.B. whom you know way better than me is for me as you described him...I cannot speak about him...

I dont believe that there is ONE METER to compare all musicians... We must learn to listen, at least me, to understand more with each passing years... At the end all geniuses are recognized by us , even those we dont like as much as others... because we  have learned even if we keep our biases and preferences...

Now for those who look for a not well known absolute treasury of piano "repertoire", the mighty Samuil Feinberg, whose fourth sonatas was praised by Scriabin himself...

As i already said, Scriabin nor Feinberg are for me secondary composers, but great one....Feinberg is a Scriabin disciple....

Here it is double CD BIS recording. Nikolaos Samaltanos plays the piano in the 1,4,5,9,10,11 sonatas. In the other sonatas (2,3,6,7,8,12) plays Christophe Sirodeau.

The two pianists to my heart and ears are more than just good....

Feinberg sonatas are massage of the soul and spirit dialogue....The dual musical time dimension are together woven in a continuous flyings between heights and depths , the melody is born only to return different toward his original source....I cannot fault Feinberg... It is with Scriabin my prefered works in the Russian piano school... The greatest piano school on earth by far...For sure it is only my opinion, feel free to differ... 😁😉😊

One word can resume these sonatas for me :

"Enthusiasm" , which meaning came from ancient greek i studied in my teen and i remembered for all my life the stunning etimological spelling :ἐνθουσιασμός from ἐν (en, “in”) and θεός (theós, “god”) and οὐσία (ousía, “essence”), meaning "inspired by [a] god’s essence"...

The melody, rythm and harmony are only there to suggest a journey toward a never taken road toward a higher truth....

As claimed the Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck in his stunning 1000 pages book about God ," la clef des songes" untranslated alas! in English and even not officially published save as a PDF on the internet , "truth" cannot be defined....

The greatest Christian mystic before him, Dyonisos the Areopagyte demonstrated why and inspired completely Georg Cantor, who know him well because he taught also theology , for his set theory foundation and pre-axiomatization principle of lim itation of size , the greatest mathematician before Grothendieck...Cantor and Grothendieck are without any possible discussion the most influentials and deep mathematicians in mathematic history, on par with Archimedes, Newton, Gauss or Riemann...

Feinberg Sonatas

For those who like pianism...

The son of a god and himself a god of piano...

A top Scriabinian too...

And his Liszt is played by supreme expressiveness with the melody coming from vertical musical time...Then pulsating and not merely flowing...

Expressiveness is not about beauty but about truth to the emotion , it is moving before being felt beautiful, the indication in the pianism that expressiveness dominate is the pulsation over and guiding the melodic line... Only very great pianists can do it without fails... They often trade off for horizontal plastic beauty...

I will not give examples at the risk to hurt someone feelings...But listen carefully how some notes oscillate powerfully aimed at your heart like a rifle bullet... This is expression, it is not so much the melody that moves us but the pulsating  heart singing it ( the pianist)...

Stanislav Neuhaus (1927-1980), piano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9l-a0CFV2M&list=PL_FxhjClAeZfWH8k76xiIfO-pb6VjurVy