Sony’s new 50-CD compilation, “Vladimir Horowitz: The Unreleased Live Recordings 1966-1983,” is a startling exercise in candor three times over.
1.It argues that a series of “live” Horowitz recitals, released on RCA between 1975 and 1983 and edited by RCA’s Jack Pfeiffer, misrepresent and diminish those concerts by fixing wrong notes.
2.It frankly documents Horowitz’s artistic nadir: the disastrous 1983 concerts he played while heavily medicated.
3.It blames this debacle on the publication of Glenn Plaskin’s unnervingly unsympathetic Horowitz biography of 1983.
The first of these claims, fingering a company absorbed by Sony, is made explicit by an essay, “Horowitz: The Penultimate Chapter,” by another Horowitz: my son Bernie, who (as “Bernard Horowitz”) contributes an essay reading in part: “We can now see clearly that the RCA versions were so heavily spliced and edited as to project a Madame Tussaud version of Vladimir Horowitz.” Bernie singles out a 1979 Chicago performance of Schumann’s Humoreske: “[It] documents an artist with an original reading of a complex work, executing it down to the minutest detail and bringing the audience along every step of the way. It strikes a fatal blow against those who denigrate Horowitz’s musicianship or question his depth.”
This invitation to compare RCA’s “live” products with the new, unretouched Sony releases is worth taking seriously, and not only because Horowitz’s unedited Chicago Humoreske is (unlike Pfeiffer’s synthetic recreation) one of his most artistically compelling performances. The practice of recording music in a studio, sans audience, begot the practice of combining multiple “takes” in pursuit of perfection. All this started understandably enough: long ago, studio recordings were sonically superior to anything that could be captured in a concert hall or opera house. Even so, my favorite recordings, of whatever vintage, are rarely studio-made. (Try comparing Feodor Chaliapin’s famous Boris Godunov studio excerpts of 1922 with his less famous but more truthful Covent Garden performance of July 4, 1928, now readily available on youtube.)
The second claim inherent to “The Unreleased Live Recordings” is also made explicit by Bernie’s essay when he writes that in 1983 Horowitz “reached a point of collapse.” The most glaring evidence in the new Sony set is a Boston recital on April 24, 1983. To see what Horowitz looked like – bloated, dazed – at this sad juncture, there is the evidence of his notorious Tokyo recital of June 11.
Had Horowitz disappeared from view in the wake of his Tokyo debacle, the trajectory of his career would have terminated with a descent into obscurity. That he was able to put all this behind him – that he in fact enjoyed what Bernie calls an Indian Summer – required absorbing the shock of the Plaskin biography. Bernie reveals:
“As the ‘70s drew to a close, Glenn Plaskin began collecting information for an unauthorized biography. In 1979, he wrote to Caine Alder, a longtime Horowitz devotee who had provided Plaskin access to a lifetime of Horowitz research: ‘To get a substantial advance . . . and good commercial response to the book we cannot make a white-washed tribute that ignors ]sic] facts and figures about Horowitz’s life that may be painful to him . . . The tensions of performance and emotional turmoil at times sent him into depressions and evidently into institutions at various times in his life. The suicide of his daughter and what the means, ETC., ETC.., ETC.’”
The resulting book, which reached Horowitz in stages during its period of gestation, began its sordid life-narrative by claiming (erroneously) that Horowitz fabricated his place of birth. It portrayed an artist without a core.
Horowitz, to be sure, was a man with troubles. His family was decimated by the Russian Revolution. He wound up in the US, age 24, unworldly and unmoored. As with so many artists, he was the beneficiary or victim of a nervous intensity so powerful it could have destroyed him. Sony’s “Unreleased Live Recordings” newly discloses what he could accomplish when, in late mid-career, he channeled his demons without taming them.
Comentarios