Underrated Classical Musicians: Jascha Spivakovsky

 

So today's Schnabel's 140th birthday. Obviously we're not going to do anything on Schnabel, but we will on a Schnabel pupil. Jascha Spivakovsky, slightly older brother of Tossy Spivakovsky. There is a very, VERY small chance that both of them may be the greatest practitioner of their instrument ever set down on record, only for nobody to notice them. In the case of Tossy, I am honestly tempted to go that far. What he does with the violin is inhuman. Jascha seems to have the mere distinction of being as good as any pianist in the world within his extraordinary generation of pianists.

Both embarked on European careers that looked marked for superstardom so outsize that there was no comparison even to the great lights of their day, only to be severely interrupted by World War II, and to never recover their fame even if they both maintained their high standard to their final days.

Here he is in the extremely un-Schnabel repertory of Schumann's Carnaval, and the playing is extremely un-Schnabel. It's extraordinarily accurate and tightly coiled, with effects that make your eyes bug, yet with a soaring lyricism and phrases that rise and fall. Leon Fleisher, another Schnabel pupil who went slightly heretic, was not unlike this in his young years. For all the electronic wiring, the basic pulse of this reading surprisingly slow, with enormous amounts of rubato on the micro level. One can be forgiven for preferring, as I do, the more relaxed sort poetry from contemporaries like Kempff, Moisewitsch, Cherkassky, Solomon et al. This is clearly a romantic pianist of pronounced bravura inclinations who is almost too immaculately trained. You feel him in argument with his musical good sense, wanting to go 'full Horowitz' with his musical superego saying 'we don't do that.'

It's a truly fascinating bit of piano playing. A Carnaval utterly unlike any other and this divided self one of the very greatest readings of one of the greatest of all piano pieces, which is, in so many ways, a work about a composer with a divided sense of self as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxciozulmuY