I don't know what to say except that this is one of the greatest of all recordings ever made. It's plausible that Mozart himself could not have improved on this playing. Until this weekend I have always felt that the Mozart Piano Concertos, particularly the opening movements, were a slightly closed book to me. I've mostly kept my confusion by them as a secret. Whether in modern performances, old school, or period, always seemed overly sweet and china doll-ish and confirmed people's impression of Mozart sounding like a Rococo prancer. This is so different. I knew there was something I was missing. The piano concerto's form fit Mozart like a glove. Mozart wrote his instrumental music like there's still a soloist, the high instruments always get the tune and everybody else just accompanies him. Mozart, from birth, was accustomed to being the star and having mere mortals marvel at him.
Now I hear it. All sorts of performers would sentimentalize the music, but these compositions truly have all the barbed wit of the operas. These are absolutely his instrumental magnum opi I always suspected they were, but could never hear.
If we're to believe the trends of recorded history, the greatest generations of performing musicians were probably not the unrecorded generations performing amid the greatest composers, nor were they the 'Giants' active at the end of the compositional golden age like Cortot and Furtwangler. Performers should not be so larger than life that they obscure the composers. Nor should they be so self-effacing that they assume the notes stand on their own.
In my opinion, two golden generations of performing, not composing, happened between 1890 and 1935, and were caught entirely on record. Never did this music mean more than it did in the wake of the 20th century crises which killed the world that birthed this music. Performers born between 1890 and 1910 remember the old world, but only as a distant memory they can't quite conjure. They grew up chastened by its limitations and excesses, and saw how the values of the old world hastened its departure. They were, by and large, romantics, but most stopped before romanticism veered to decadence. There's surely overlap: speaking just among pianists; Hofmann (1876) and Rachmaninov (1873) were surely not decadent, Gieseking (1895) and Horowitz (1904) surely were. Schnabel (1882) and Rubinstein (1887) were surely not decadent, Arrau (1903) surely was (ducks...). To hear music from the former such musicians, not just Hofmann and Rachmaninov and Schnabel, but Casadesus, Solomon, Firkusny, Curzon, Kempff, Kraus, Serkin, Hess, Grinberg, Haskill, Wild, Annie Fischer, is to hear music with new ears in all its freshness.
The in-between generation is something all it's own. Another generation of musical giants: Bernstein, Richter, Menuhin, Lipatti, Gitlis, Kapell, Fricsay, with later additions like Callas, DFD, Gould, Kleiber, Harnoncourt, Gulda, Rostropovich and Pavarotti (there are obviously certain musicians I refuse to include ...) - a new kind of giant for the 20th century, made possible by a mix of recording stardom and postwar prosperity. They gained their insights as much through recording as live performance, and their effects on music I'm not entirely sure I can explain understand or explain; but they are all titans. They may be decadent, but they show you entire worlds of meaning.
The generation between 1915 and 1940 is much more austere, and only knew the old world by the second hand memories, ethos, and customs of their parents. The 'greatest generation' were the ultimate in chastened self-effacement, and yet the self-effacement was rarely ever ascetic and leavened with the warmth and idealism of those who understood why so much homeostasis was necessary. If the generation before them had musician after musician who yielded the ultimate in insight and meaning, musician after musician in this generation yielded the ultimate in music's spiritual, healing power. Listening to Brendel and Fleisher, Lipatti and de Larrocha, Ashkenazy and Gilels, Moravec and Lupu, Katchen and Kovacevich, is so often a cathartic experience that puts life itself in a much more contextual perspective, and you (or at least I) emerge with a new outlook.
On the bell curve of our greatest performing musicians, these two generations contain the most of our greatest musical treasures. They, beyond everyone else, showed us the necessity of why the greatest music was necessary, and could guide us through a life that avoided the tragedies that their parents' generations sought so avidly.
Listen to Lili Kraus. Mozart, like Bach and Shakespeare and the Bible, is there to accompany us through all of life's seasons. He celebrates our triumphs, he puts our tragedies in context, and he tells us that all good and bad things in life are not quite what they seem. No pianist has ever caught Mozart's universe of cosmic meaning like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvRhkZLM__E
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