dk on the RMCR group calls him Brendull. He also referred to Arrau as Claudio Arthritis…
Lol as if those geriatrics at RMCR aren’t waking up 4 times a night to pee.
Even da Ho used to simplify heaps of sheeyat, is he a fraud too?
Da Ho simplified version of the 8-12
Basically bettah den da original 
Horowitz at his best was a pyrotechnic, transcendental performer with a totally different repertoire & musical approach (who occasionally made pieces MORE difficult than the original)…Brendel is just average and boring in comparison IMO - certainly when you compare his Liszt with Horowitz’s. I love some of Brendel’s Beethoven and Schubert but even there I prefer other performers who have more to offer, musically and peniztically.
I get that, but that’s not the point I’m making.
In the preurtext era, it was very common to simplify difficult passages, and Horowitz probably did it more than any other famous pianist (old style rubinstein notwithstanding). Just because a pianist did it doesn’t make them a fraud.
Well, that’s one of the reasons why that joke circulated - because Brendel WAS very much an advocate of Urtext yet he made the most difficult passages in Liszt easier by cheating them.
Not so sure that Horowitz often purely simplified things. Perhaps it’s better to say he “arranged” certain passages because that way they sounded more pianistically. That doesn’t always mean they were easier to play for others…
And just think of his arrangements of Mussorgsky and Liszt HRs. No improvements but great fun…
I see. He fleshed out the piano part in Mozart concerti too, not sure how that fits in with urtext. For me, the urtext pianist par excellence was Arrau, and no one would accuse him of cheating. I’m still not opposed to it, btw. I didn’t do it myself but piano playing is hard enough as it is, if you can remove a note or two without it being super obvious, I don’t have a problem with it. However, I draw the line at playing the Ravel LH concerto with both hands or redistributing 10/1. But in things like Iberia, why not?
I generally like Horowitz’s arrangements, but couldn’t listen to that pictures more than once, vallée d’obermann also.
I liked his Danse Macabre, HR2 and HR15 though. I think the 15th is better than the original, actually.
It’s a most interesting dicussion because there are all kind of gradations between cheating, arranging and simplifying!
Ravel LH Concerto - definitely not use your right hand.
Debussy pour les huit doigts - nope don’t use your thumbs.
But Iberia - why not? Or Beethoven the first notes of the Hammerklavier or Opus 111 - sure I don’t mind if pianists play them with two hands…
da ‘tier 2 legendz’ moi iz worried iz not bein sufficiently prezerved iz da Giezeking, da Orozco, da Kapell n da Entremont
I have never cared for Entremont somehow. Any recordings that you can recommend?
Orozco is definitely being forgotten, Gieseking and Kapell not so much.
I think rearrangement was more typical than simplification per se, but even if we allow for both, the difference is that 
and ruby didn’t go around saying to respect da score.
And another thing… it’s a matter of historical record that da pimp told his students something along the lines of “if you’re good enough to play (various paraphrases / HRs etc), you’ve earnt the right to tamper with the score”. It’s in accounts of Weimar masterclasses. So, unusually, we actually have a concrete account, albeit a third person one, of interpretative practices of a major historical figure, and what do Urtext fetishists do? Replace it with their own dogma. So much for “respecting the composer’s intentions”!
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Hamelin:
«By contrast, there are definitely awkward things in Rachmaninov and – I say this at the risk of blasphemy and raising the hackles of musicologists and even pianists – it is possible to re-score his music ever so slightly, occasionally taking out a note that is acoustically unnecessary. Of course I don’t approach a piece intending to do this but sometimes, even in the Third Concerto, when no other solution can be found, it can make for a better.»
Yeah, Horowitz does that a lot too in the Rach-3. My old friend & once VH expert Dennis Gustafsson had this as a hobby of sorts in the late 90s and early 00s to find VH simplifications, and they’re all over the place.
But on the otha hand, I’ve also read accounts of da 
masterclasses where he was extremely precise, if not pedantic, when it came to following the exact indications in works of Chopin and himself.
(I have a book of Von Bülow about this)
I can imagine that he only allowed accomplished artists to deviate from da score, but only after they had learn how to play exactly what was written…
Btw I also agree with Jorge Bolet who said that if you have lived with a work for many years, and worked on it again & again, in a way you know the piece better than the composer did after all the hours of practising, performing and analyzing it. Then you’ve ‘earned a right’ to make some changes if they seem appropriate to you - which Bolet often did btw.
My interpretation of these two facets is that, if you’re playing eg the sonata, play what he wrote or with absolutely minimal deviation. In something more free, eg paraphrases, use the score as a starting point. (I think, for example, Henselt wrote out alternatives he’d heard Liszt deploy in the Lucia sextet paraphrase, as a “performance edition”.)
How about playing the Ravel LH Concerto with the RH instead?
And Rachmaninoff didn’t mind!
The 1941 Barbirolli rec would not be possible with all the notes
Indeed. Rachmaninoff was just happy for people to be playing his music. I think I read a story in Schonberg that Horowitz hesitated to record the PC2 because the piano only had an obligato role in the finale and had suggested rewriting it, and Rach told him he could go ahead and do whatever he wanted with it to make it more dazzling for the pianist. Alas it didn’t happen, but that’s on Horowitz. So Rach was onboard with more than just cutting his work.
in fact, Rachmaninoff performed the work with cuts, not just on his recording, but apparently in his live performances in the 30’s and 40’s as well.
IMHO the Rach 3 is better with those cuts.
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