More on Josef Hofmann

A Beethoven 4 unlike any other in the recorded era. The 'very serious' crowd who flocked to Marlboro would hate this, but one has to figure that Hofmann's way of doing Beethoven goes back to Anton Rubinstein, who by contemporary accounts was the first pianist to truly reveal all 32 of Beethoven in all their glory. In it's way, this may be a far more serious Beethoven than all the austerity in the world.

Hofmann was clearly past his prime here (and potentially drunk...) but this is musicianship completely different from any other, and potentially a higher form of it. Listen to what Hofmann does every time there is an unexpected new tonality, Hofmann doesn't just bring out the fundamental bass which arrives us there, he brings out the entire transitional line that leads to the change. Every dissonance on which the symphonic form depends is highlighted. All sorts of inner lines are brought out, even clarified. He handbreaks all the time, but never indiscriminantly, rather to highlight a formal transition, or a diminished chord, or 9th or suspension so that there is no missing the dissonance. This, surely, is how audiences became spellbound by this music in the first place - making them into musiclovers who understand the language of symphonic form without it feeling like an impenetrable foreign language. Hofmann has clearly analyzed the contrapuntal and harmonic implications of every single note in relation to every other. The knowledge on command here is a miracle to behold. If this is a spontaneous interpretation, done differently every night on impulse as people always said Hofmann did, it is all the more miraculous.

This approach is probably better for more dramatic, self-evidently virtuoso Beethoven: I'm certainly not gonna throw out Kempff, Kraus, Firkusny, Moravec... Many passages (hardly all) seem to lack taht luminous, compassionate humanity that bespeak the ultimate musical humanism. For all his skill and genius, Hofmann was still a virtuoso out to inflame rather than console. But this is no mere exhibitionism or finger jockery, this is what romantic music making does best. Just as classicism only means something when married to romantic warmth, romanticism only means something when allied to the shrewdest intelligence, and the intelligence here is of an encyclopedic depth. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6gX7Q_ZFS4 

I doubt there has ever been a Chopin player greater than Hofmann, even before the recorded era (@#$% Cortot and his giant dump of Vichysoisse on the keys). Rubinstein was obviously great, but honestly... Rubinstein's greatest contribution is his Brahms. He is quite possibly the greatest Brahms player of all time - I remember growing up with a liner notes of him playing Brahms PC2 (still the best I've ever heard that work) in which he said that the music of Brahms is even closer to him than Chopin. I believe it. Rubinstein, great as he was, stageham as he was, was too austere a player for the ultimate in Chopin. Chopin is a populist, his music is a little bit flamboyant and not entirely sincere. It's the music of the 19th century cool kids. It's not entirely a pose, the overripe, decadent presence of death and sex in Chopin is very real - and often, like in Wagner, they seem to be dancing together. But nevertheless, Chopin's music sometimes tells lies about what love is, it tells lies about the benefits of national pride and militarism, it tells lies about the wonders of glamour. So Chopin in performance should be just a little bit neon and chintzy, and the ostentation of Hofmann is the ultimate in Chopin because it's backed by such great, ingenious, natural musical sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crG_sRwDsu0