Today's Monday Musical Object is...
...the “Original Jacket Collection: Vladimir Horowitz”. It’s an impressive chunk of recorded sound,
the ten LPs Horowitz recorded for Columbia in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, including
the double album of his return to Carnegie Hall, all on CDs packaged in slips
printed with the original LP labels. I
got it, on sale, for $25.
This is a crazy object on many levels. First, the music. Wow.
Horowitz. The colors he could
call out of a piano, the drama, the beauty, the charm, just…wow. Faults may occasionally be found, or
violations of modern taste, but they’re rare and subjective. There’s not much can be said but…wow.
Once the jaw gets picked up off the floor, attention can be
paid to the packaging. It’s quaint. It does make me nostalgic for the LP format:
sleeve pictures could be large enough to be art, and liner notes could be
informative. The art has been shrunk,
and the liner notes are still informative but make me reach for my glasses.
Another thought-provoking feature of this object is the
price. Twenty-five bucks for some of the
most amazing performances on record.
This is something that, while great for a consumer, is problematic. Let’s say I am (as I once was) a young
student without much money but seeking to broaden my knowledge of music with a
nice recording of some Scarlatti. I
could risk paying full price for a newly issued CD, featuring a pianist who is developing
an interesting career—say, the recent recording by Alexandre Tharaud. I could
go further out on a limb and buy, at full price, a recording by somebody I’ve never heard of, but who has been picked
up by a known label. Or, I could go and
buy Horowitz, for cheap. Duh. The only thing the recent recordings have to
offer, to the naive, is superior sound quality, which doesn’t count for much in
the MP3 age. A performer today is in
competition not just with her cohort, but with a century's ancestors.
So, there’s a final thought this cube of culture knocked out
of my head. On listening to it, it
becomes apparent that Horowitz was very much a “live” performer. There are artists who are at their best in
the studio (Glenn Gould is one of many examples). Then, there are those that you just have to
be there for. These recordings of
Horowitz, many from concerts, are great, but it’s clear that the concert
experience would have been transcendent. I don't think the attendees would have traded their ticket stubs for a shiny disc.
For about as long as there have been humans, there has been
music—and when a human stopped actively making music, the music stopped. For a tiny smidge of human history, we’ve
been able to bottle up this temporal art, and in 2013 I can listen to a concert
from 1965 played by a guy who died in 1989.
I’m not a hundred percent sure that this miracle is a good thing. I have the Carnegie Hall concert playing in
the background, and sadly, I’m not really paying attention to it. I dip in and out—there was a five-minute
pause between the last two paragraphs, while Horowitz played the snot out of
the Bach-Busoni fugue in c minor—but right now I’m sort of humming idly along
with the Schumann Fantasy. I type, and
the combined genius of Schumann and the talent of Horowitz provide nothing more
than high-class background noise.
Doesn’t this cheapen the experience of music—especially at $25 for 10
CD’s?
I haven’t resolved this for myself, and in most cases, I don't need to. There are recordings that I treasure—Horowitz
playing the Rachmaninoff 3rd with Reiner, a lot of Glenn Gould’s
work, and so on—that I will happily play as background while I muck out a goat
pen, but that I also return to again and again, and listen to as hard as I can.
But there’s a separate class of
recordings: recordings that I’ve played once, and they knocked my socks off and
curled my hair. Richter and Leinsdorf
playing the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, Arrau playing the Liszt 1st
Concerto, Godowsky playing the Chopin Berceuse…for some reason, I won't
to return to these, though they wait for me. It seems somehow unmannerly to hear them
again, and sacrilegious to contemplate doing anything while they play. These recordings remind me, paradoxically, that
for virtually all of humanity—and probably, those in the audience in 1965—music
is played, then stops,
and is never heard again.
I am curious, if anybody is out there reading this: is there
anything transcendent and wonderful you’ve experienced—music, art of any sort, a place, anything—that you
have perfect freedom to revisit, but won’t?
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