The New Golden Era

Vladimir Horowitz, Shura Cherkassky, Abram Chasins, Robert Goldsand

by David Dubal









In its continuing Grand Piano Series, Nimbus has programmed an intriguing compact disc of four pianists in repertoire demanding charm and virtuosity. Vladimir Horowitz and Shura Cherkassky will continue being celebrated, doubtless as long as there are pianos. The careers of Robert Goldsand and Abram Chasins however were distinguished but not nearly as celebrated.

Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) had in his lifetime an unequalled prestige and, unlike many performing artists, interest in his art and personality has never waned. He continues to be the yardstick of pianistic prowess and to the world represents the magic and romance of the piano itself.

Some years back while interviewing on radio the Polish violinist Wanda Wilkomirska, I tongue-in-cheek asked her if she thought there was such a thing as a 'best violinist'. She quite properly retorted, "There can be no best anything." Naturally I agreed, but she looked troubled, then added, "I'm sorry, there is a best. It's Horowitz. He is better than anyone, any violinist, any singer, any pianist. Oh, but he is also not human." Such a statement characterises the amazing response Horowitz always arouses.

James Hilton years ago wrote of Horowitz, "If by some dispensation a man born deaf were to be given hearing for a single hour he might well spend the whole time with Horowitz. Indeed, when I listened to Horowitz for the first time, it was almost like that - as if I had never heard the piano before - as if the instrument itself had never known what it could do until Horowitz came along." Mr. Hilton has written a serious statement, indeed, and one that can be analysed by the hour. First of all, Horowitz unlocks secrets of sonority on the piano, which more than any other pianist remain in the inner ear or, in Aaron Copland's phrase, presents a piercing 'sonorous image'. Simply put, the memory of the sounds Horowitz produced in his repertoire has come to represent for many the actual spirit of the work itself; a fact which goes beyond the intrinsic value of the interpretation. This is the reason why arguably he 'owned' so many works. What he touched became his property. This was the reason he laughingly resented anyone playing 'his' pieces. He identified with his chosen music to such an extent and with such passionate focus, as well as interpretive creativity, that in his heart they were no longer in the public domain.

When Rakhmaninov heard the young Horowitz play his Third Concerto, he basically relinquished the score to his younger colleague who played it not better, but with more success than Rakhmaninov had ever had with it. Horowitz brought a new type of sound, a riveting sonority to that concerto and to other works which no pianist had ever achieved.

Perhaps the great virtuoso Shura Cherkassky best sums up Horowitz's Rakhmaninov Third Concerto saying, "I shall never forget the first time I heard Horowitz in the Rakhmaninov Third. I believe it was 1930, on New Year's Eve at Carnegie Hall. As I was listening, I actually thought I was going to faint. I had to take a long walk afterward to clear my head, I was absolutely crazy. In 1986, I played the Rakhmaninov Third in London, at the Royal Festival Hall. After the concert, I was told Horowitz was there. Thank goodness I didn't know he was coming. Imagine playing the Rakhmaninov Third before Horowitz. I would have been embarrassed. Fortunately, I played it very well that evening, but nobody has ever reached the heights Horowitz did in that concerto. Nobody had such terrific technique. Many people speak of Horowitz's sound in the bass; I found his sound in the high registers unique.

Other pianists and listeners will choose their own branch of Horowitz's repertoire to proclaim his dominance. What pianist attempts Liszt's Au bord d'une source, Sonnetta del Petrarca No. 104, the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody, B minor Sonata, Funérailles, Valse oubliée, and so many other Liszt works without trembling in the shade of the master?

Who would think of playing Scarlatti Sonatas, or the Prokofiev Seventh Sonata, the Kabalevsky Third Sonata, the Schumann Humoreske and Kreisleriana, the Chopin F sharp minor Polonaise, the Rakhmaninov Second Sonata, Preludes, Etudes, the Third, Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth Sonatas of Skriabin, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition or the Tchaikovsky First Concerto without shuddering and remembering the thrill of listening to those records for the first time, or the thousandth time, for they wear so very well with the passing of time. Certainly no discography of any other artist has been so completely and consistently available. When an exhausted Horowitz retired in 1953, the musical world was bereft. It seemed that a great tradition had passed. It was a difficult time for piano playing. Schnabel, Barère, and others had recently died as well as the young masters Kapell and Lipatti. Rakhmaninov, Lhévinne, Friedman, and Hofmann had died or retired within the last decade. Young pianists were looking for heroes. What a relief that a new generation could at least glimpse once again the mercurial Horowitz when he returned to Carnegie Hall in May 1965 after a twelve-year absence! The pianist Joseph Kalichstein felt

"It was like Zeus coming down from Mount Olympus to 57th Street... How could any mortal match those earlier feats? Maybe he wasn't that great after all, and who wanted to find that out? I was extraordinarily nervous for him and for us. Needless to say, the awe grew, the doubt disappeared with the first concert. The mighty control, the haunting touch, the endless, incredible ability to voice and to have a melodic line pierce through, Heifetz-like, without ever banging or forcing the piano - it was all there, for us to marvel at for many years to come."

For Horowitz devotees, it is of unusual interest that Nimbus has brought to CD excellent restorations of six piano rolls from Horowitz's mid-twenties made at New York's Aeolian Duo-Art Studios.

Horowitz admired Schubert deeply, though he was not always comfortable playing him, possibly because of the unwieldiness of Schubert's piano writing. He respected Liszt's idiomatic transcriptions for the piano and late in life recorded the Schubert-Liszt StÀndchen (No. 4 from the song-cycle Schwanengesang). On this CD, we hear Liebesbotschaft (No. 1 from Schwanengesang) from Schubert's last year, 1828. Schubert's song is set to a poem by Ludwig Rellstab - the culprit who named Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata, claiming to see lunar rays over Lake Lucerne when listening to the first movement.

Horowitz instinctively loved Tchaikovsky, especially the Sixth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin. He once said to me, "Don't trust anyone who does not like Tchaikovsky." His recordings of the First Concerto are pulverising, especially the 'live' performance with Szell and the New York Philharmonic. For tighter performances, the ones with Toscanini are prized. Of the more than one hundred solo pieces of Tchaikovsky Horowitz recorded only the rousing Dumka, Op. 59, one of Tchaikovsky's more bombastic solo pieces, subtitled, "Russian village scene for piano". Most likely, Tchaikovsky's awkward and often ungrateful piano writing kept Horowitz away. However, he made two recordings of Dumka, this 1928 Duo-Art piano roll and in 1942, for RCA Victor.

During his early career, his show stopper was his own Variations on a Theme from Bizet's Carmen which takes the song from Act II for its theme. There are actually four recorded versions; the earliest is a Welte piano roll made when he was twenty-three, followed by the 1928 Duo-Art performance, presented on this Nimbus disc, which sizzles. Horowitz made slight changes from a 1947 RCA disc in his CBS version of 1968 which for this listener are not particularly effective. Audiences adored his Carmen variations and he was beseeched to perform them everywhere. Inevitably, he grew tired of doing his duty, and lamented that when he played Carmen or Stars and Stripes as encores, audiences promptly forgot the rest of the programme.

Horowitz knew all of the twenty-seven Chopin Etudes and recorded twelve of them throughout his career. Like Artur Rubinstein he felt insecure in certain ones, like the Winterwind, Op. 25, No. 11. He was convinced that on the 'modern' piano Chopin would have changed some aspects of the piano writing. "Oh, that I am sure of," he once said to me. On this CD, he performs the lugubrious E flat minor Etude, Op. 10, No. 6, an anguished piece, which Henry T. Finck says, "seems as if it were in a sort of double minor... much sadder than ordinary minor." In 1963, he recorded it again.

The Aeolian Duo-Art recording of the Etude in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12 is Horowitz's only recording of the so-called 'Ocean' Etude, although a day before he died on 5th November 1989, he was planning on recording it again.

Saint-Saëns died in 1921 at eighty-six, only four years before Horowitz's Paris début. How wonderful it would have been if the French composer could have heard him play. Saint-Saëns, a master pianist himself, had considered Liszt to be the supreme pianist. In 1866 Saint-Saëns had not yet heard Liszt who had been retired from the stage for nearly twenty years. Saint-Saëns wrote, "I already considered him to be a genius and had formed in advance an almost impossible conception of his pianism. Judge my astonishment when I realised that he far exceeded even this expectation. The dreams of my youthful fancy were but prose beside the Dionysiac poetry evoked by his supernatural fingers... Never again shall we see or hear anything like it." When Liszt, the greatest transcriber in history, complimented Saint-Saëns on his arrangement of Danse Macabre, the composer was delighted. Saint-Saëns' Symphonic Poem surely came from Liszt's own Mephisto Valse and the Hungarian was enthralled with Saint-Saëns' mocking descriptive powers and the devilry of the rattling of skeletons in the graveyard. Liszt's version is a strenuous technical chore which Horowitz recorded for Aeolian Company with extreme relish. Noteworthy is the fact that on this recording Horowitz plays Liszt's original version without the added Horowitz contributions to the score which later he often played in public and recorded in 1942. It had become a threesome: Saint-Saëns-Liszt-Horowitz.

Abram Chasins (1903-1987) was born in New York City of Russian Jewish parents. He was a precocious boy and was educated at New York's Ethical Culture School and Institute of Musical Art, the precursor of the Juilliard School, where he studied with the Australian-born pianist Ernest Hutcheson. Hutcheson was a formidable musician of a classical bent whose lineage went back to his own studies with Carl Reinecke (1824-1910), Mendelssohn's protégé.

Chasins' Germanic training however was not all he had desired and in the spring of 1926, his life was completely changed by meeting Josef Hofmann, who had heard of the success of the three Chinese pieces of Chasins which are on this CD. He had often heard Hofmann perform but coming into contact with him was to be a revelation. Hofmann listened to Chasins play his three Chinese pieces, liked them, and proceeded to tell the twenty-three year-old Chasins what his piano playing lacked. "There are a few things you have to learn, quite a few things, and they would make a vast difference to your playing, to your entire life in music. I think I might be able to help you with some of them". On the spur of the moment, the great pianist invited Chasins to join Hofmann and his wife in Europe to study with him during his first European tour since before World War I. In his entertaining book Speaking of Pianists, Chasins explains, "It would be difficult to exaggerate the benevolence and integrity of my first piano teachers Bertha Fering Tapper, Richard Epstein and Ernest Hutcheson. I owe them all incalculable gratitude. They led me, in a succession of valuable lessons, to control my fingers, to acquire a large and significant repertoire, and to hold a serious attitude toward a musician's obligations... Yet, from my first two-hour lesson with Hofmann in London, I learned more than during my entire previous experience. Each comment let in a new flood of light."

Chasins' association with Hofmann continued through the years and Hofmann was influential in having Chasins teach for a time at Curtis. In 1929, he made his début in Philadelphia playing the premiere of his piano concerto No. 1. In 1931, Toscanini conducted Chasins' Parade. Throughout the decades he composed a considerable amount of piano music. But he was seldom happy with his works. He called the larger scale Narrative his best piano work which was recorded by his wife Constance Keene, who is still active as a concert pianist and teacher at the Manhattan School of Music.

As with his compositions, Chasins was dissatisfied with his own piano playing. He seemed to know every important pianist of the era, and perhaps he became intimidated by the exploits of Hofmann, Godowsky, Rakhmaninov, and Horowitz. He did a great deal of teaching, gave lecture recitals, and for many years was a broadcaster of classical music who wielded much power on New York City's radio station WQXR, the station of the New York Times. The constant programming of the station as well as writing books, such as The Van Cliburn Legend and a biography of Leopold Stowkowski, fully occupied his time.

The three Chinese pieces are still heard occasionally. The listener can easily detect Chasins' deft pianism and his glee at playing his music. Of Flirtation in a Chinese Garden, the composer wrote, "It was written for the white keys only, and it contrives some ingenious and amusing dissonances in C major. It interprets an up-to-date flirtation in the Orient. The character of the opening is light and fluttering as an artfully waved fan. I must confess to plagiarism in the middle section. Doubtless you will remember the tune, 'Where DID you get that Hat?' I saw the enamoured Chinese swain vaulting the garden gate; he wears one of those absurd Chinese bowlers. The young Chinese lady inquires with sarcasm, 'Where did you get that hat?' I altered this theme so as to make it oriental in feeling and developed it in my own fashion. The close flutters and waves as uncertainly as the beginning, indicating that this little flirtation will not be the last."

Describing the intent of Rush-Hour in Hong Kong, the composer writes, "Nobody seems to know whether or not Hong Kong has a rush hour. But if there is, or ever will be one, this is what it will sound like!... with all the assurance of one who has never been there...". In his chapter on Leopold Godowsky, Chasins writes, "It was 1925, and I had committed the offence of writing a piano piece that had become a 'best-seller'. I immediately fell victim to Godowsky's famed wit. 'Is it true,' asked Godowsky, 'that your Rush-Hour in Hong Kong has been published only six months and is already in its sixteenth edition?' 'Why, yes, Mr. Godowsky,' I answered, with the dumb aplomb of youth, unaware of the deadly missile hurtling in my direction. 'You know' Godowsky said, 'I was never crazy about that piece, but so bad I didn't think it was!'"

A Shanghai Tragedy is the third and weightiest of Chasins' little triptych. The composer writes, "It was suggested by Florence Reed's performance in The Shanghai Gesture. It is in no sense a musical translation; it is an impression of the play. The Shanghai Tragedy begins with dawn in a Chinese city; a city which is on the threshold of tragedy... Emotional unrest follows, and the last section portrays the sinister day blurring into night."

Although Shura Cherkassky was a man of eighty-six when he died in London on 27th December 1995, the musical world was shocked. Mr. Cherkassky seemed as if he would go on for years. There had not been the slightest indication of any diminution of powers; indeed his technique was perhaps sharper and more accurate, his reflexes more pinpoint than any other virtuoso who had ever attained that age. He never thought of husbanding his strength on stage, nor of dropping repertoire that he could no longer physically manage or do justice to. To the music-loving public, Cherkassky's performances sounded almost exotic as compared to the often standardised playing of his younger colleagues. He shone like a beacon in the concert halls of the world and the dazzling poetic imagery effortlessly bursting from the keyboard amazed his delighted public. A Cherkassky recital was an event, an adventure; one spoke about it with excitement. It was fun - it could be startling musically. As the man was a total original so was his music-making instinctive, guttural, with a gleaming and unique sound emanating from his small, muscular hands. To see this little man walking on the concert platform, a leprechaun of a being with his inimitable bow was to see a man comfortably at ease on the stage. Indeed the stage was Cherkassky's true abode, and the piano was his life. He gave to it unending devotion, and worked at it with a passion that defied usual fatigue. He said, "In life, I am very impatient, except for one thing - practising the piano. Then I am abnormally patient, abnormally!"

Nimbus presents in these extraordinary evocations from Cherkassky's childhood prodigy days four pieces which travelled the world with him his whole life. Liszt's Rigoletto paraphrase, based on the celebrated quartet, shows Liszt's unequalled skill at translating any type of music to the piano. He almost doubles the length of the original Verdi quartet, and since its composition in 1860, it has been a staple item of concert pianists and beloved by audiences. Verdi and Liszt somehow never met, but the Italian admired Liszt's transcriptions from his operas. Cherkassky's performance was made when he was in his mid-teens.

Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) was one of the finest purveyors of salon music of his time. Although he died in poverty, he had made a small fortune producing works of delicious fluff, utilising the instrument with a captivating brilliance in bejewelled piano settings. His pieces usually sound technically more difficult than they actually are, but many of them demand a type of virtuosity that differentiates them from Arthur Loesser's phrase, "brilliant but not difficult". Above all, Moszkowski demands elegance in performance. Throughout his output are scattered many waltzes, ranging from the once-famous Valse Brillante in A flat and the large-scale Valse in E major to the Liebeswalzer, a masterpiece of flirtatious waltzing. As one hears in this performance, the young Cherkassky is in full swing.

As with the other pieces on this CD, Cherkassky never lost his fondness for his Prélude Pathétique which he composed as a boy. It's a concoction of Tchaikovsky and early Skriabin with a rather 'corny' ending. One of Cherkassky's fun-filled encores was Rakhmaninov's wonderful Polka de W.R. (the composer's father). Little Shura made the roll at the age of twelve. After several years of privation after the Russian Revolution, the Cherkassky family was able to leave the Soviet Union and came to Baltimore, Maryland in the summer of 1923. Soon after, the boy came under the guidance of Josef Hofmann at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. The rest is history!

When twenty-year-old Robert Schumann received the publication of Chopin's Variations, on Mozart's La ci darem la mano, the young German instantly knew that Chopin had given the world a new type of pianism. In his enthusiasm he wrote a review announcing to the German public a new Polish composer. In this review, he wrote the famous quip, "Hats off, Gentlemen. A Genius!"

The work was originally composed for piano and orchestra but pianists usually play the piece dispensing with the perfunctory orchestral part.

Robert Goldsand (1911-1991) performed it frequently in a career of more than sixty seasons before the public. I asked the distinguished critic and pianist Harris Goldsmith who studied with Goldsand for a considerable time to describe his teacher. Mr. Goldsmith writes, "Robert Goldsand was the last in the line of pianistic charmers; the inheritor of the mantles of Grünfeld, von Sauer, and Moriz Rosenthal (with whom he studied). He had a debonair technical ease. I recall with astonishment how at a lesson he demonstrated the legato he desired in the difficult coda of Chopin's Fourth Ballade, but did so with his left hand. At the same time Mr. Goldsand had a serious side to his temperament. It expressed itself in several ways; in his patrician sobriety and instinctive avoidance of vulgar excess, in his exquisitely-crafted variations of texture and colour and in his reverence for the great works of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Schubert along with his fondness of the conceptions of Godowsky, Schulz-Evler et al. Indeed, his repertoire was extremely catholic, ranging from Bach's Goldberg Variations and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations to the works of Hindemith and other twentieth-century masters. In that respect an analogy can be drawn between Goldsand, Arthur Loesser and Shura Cherkassky. Like them, he was a unique individualist.


© 1997 David Dubal

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