<<  -- 6 --  John Bell Young    BOTH ANGEL AND DEVIL

For all his strengths, Horowitz was hardly immune, in substantive and even measurable ways, to the criticism that he manipulated the relationships within certain works in a manner that could be legitimately viewed as excessively inventive or even perverse. His Liszt playing was, overall, brilliant, incisive, and tremendously exciting, but also enamored of the music's most superficial dimensions at the expenses of its frequently literary and philosophical aesthetic subtexts.

Where Arrau, for example, reveled in the opulence of Liszt's wholly operatic sensibility (in the B minor sonata and the Vallee d'Oberman, for example) Horowitz dwelt on the internecine rhetorical dramas that made of some very good music little more than cliché. In his hands octaves and passagework were played principally for display, in a kind of rapid-fire martellatto rather than in service of more probative aesthetic musical values. Horowitz had no interest in infusing them, as Arrau did, with either the breadth of resonance that real singing, to speak nothing of the composer, demands.

In Scriabin, his playing was nothing if not vivid and sensual, just as the composer implicitly demands, but again, it often drifted, as it did in the Poeme Op 32 and even the 5th Sonata, into a world where sound effects prevailed over far richer expressive possibilities. Where Vladimir Sofronitsky could milk every strand of Scriabin's counterpoint while availing himself no less imaginatively of sonorous contrasts, illuminating the relationship of every line and motivic fragment to another, Horowitz settled for pleasing the listener's ear, rather than alarming it.

Elsewhere, he excelled in Chopin's smaller works, especially the mazurkas, to which he brought unusual lapidary refinement not equaled since Friedman. His handling of the larger pieces, especially those where narrative played the predominant role, such as the ballades, the Polonaise Fantasy or the B flat sonata, was inconsistent. Some performances fare better than others, depending on his mood or the particular period of his career. (In fairness, I must point out that he was reliant on medication, for example, when he played for Prince Charles in London and later in Japan, thus compromising his efficacy and concentration.) But here again, on the whole, Horowitz more often than not favored the exquisitely wrought, beautifully shaped and invariably pleasing sound effect over the destiny of a work's innumerable compositional relationships, which he declined to illuminate intelligibly. For Horowitz, the principal melody that dominated a texture was paramount in any work; any emphasis on functional structures such as pedal points and motivic motors that he could have harvested to lend greater rhythmic and harmonic tension, thus allowing a work to satisfy its own rather than his concept, were frequently jettisoned.

On the other hand, his Scarlatti and Clementi playing was a marvel in every category. Perhaps because of the relatively spare textures in combination with their Italianate sensibility, the contrapuntal complexities that seemed to evade his interest in his readings of Scriabin and Chopin never became an issue. Here, his playing was scintillating, rhythmically vivacious and absolutely loyal to both the rococo spirit of the era and to the letter of the musical document.

Continue >>