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<<  -- 5 --  John Bell Young    BOTH ANGEL AND DEVIL

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Horowitz's stage manner was not glamorous, but elegant and unobtrusive. Suavely sauntering across the stage several minutes after the house lights were lowered, he would take his seat, survey the public and then make it wait some more. He was virtually motionless when he played, even stoic. Unlike one famous young pianist nowadays who is more about hype than talent, he knew that mooning and posturing was no substitute for the discipline, musical issues and the real work that public performance demands.

'On stage you are the king and you should try to look like one, 'he once mused.' The public pays money and they want to see something esthetic.' But whatever one thought about his interpretation, Horowitz never gave it less than his all; his readings were invariably thoughtful, considered and pristinely thought out.

Perhaps what Horowitz cultivated above all was charm. Beyond the music, for which he had the greatest respect (it's not true, as some would have it, that he wildly distorted every score he got his hands on; on the contrary, he usually followed a composer's directions meticulously) he exploited the potential of sound for its own sake, engaging a kind of sonorous sorcery. Never mind his peculiar habits, such as his insistence on performing only on Sundays at 4pm; or his self-imposed twelve-year exile from the concert hall following a nervous breakdown in 1953. His objective was never simply to impress an audience, but to disclose whatever he discerned in music that was capable of enchantment.

In much of the classical repertoire, particularly Mozart, for example, he refused to conform to the kind of specific interpretive restraints imposed on it by the conventions of the classical period, 'Let me tell you a secret,' he confided in Mordecai Shehori. 'You know Mozart is not a good composer. Only the signature is good. Haydn is much better!' Yet in spite of that evidently playful dismissal, his Mozart betrayed a kind of songful, even childlike simplicity that made it far more beguiling, and ironically authentic, than the technically precise, historically correct readings favored by academia.

Shehori also reports a most amusing incident. Asked by Tom Frost, Horowitz's record producer at Sony Classical, if he was available to rehearse a Mozart concerto with Horowitz in Steinway's basement, Shehori recalls his first meeting. Asking the great man if he preferred to rehearse only his entrances, Horowitz insisted on hearing 'every note' of the orchestral reduction.

'And so I asked him,' recalls a still bemused Shehori, '"Maestro, what tempo do you want for the last movement?" to which he shot back "Very conservative!". Then he took off like a missile!'

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Copyright © 26 October 2003 John Bell Young, Tampa, Florida, USA

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