vladimir horowitz rehearses chopin polonaise - moscow, 1986

[RemovdSande11]

it is a shame he never played much Bach.

[ValdemarDragunov]

4:40 someone should check the audience for a dead person because i heard a shotgun blast.

[olivleonardo]

My God, he was so inspired here.

[renaudgg]

What is the guy saying at the begenning ??

[kasyapa]

renaudgg - i can hear him quite clearly. can you not?

[renaudgg]

@kasyapa Well yes but hes saying like: In Tchaikosy *something* ... grand concert hall?

whats after Tchaikosky

[AldenHardaway]

What color, what drama, what excitement! Few pianists have ever even approached such heights, and hardly any still live today!

[brassmonkeyjew]

There should be a mandatory retirement age for concert pianists. Thirty-five to honour Liszt!

[Rotebuehl1]

@brassmonkeyjew

OMG! And what would one do to all those great ones that started their carreers after 40?

[chesterfieldoriental]

no glases... wow

[kasyapa]

contacts, possibly. :)

[Lity10]

Linses maybe? xD

[kasyapa]

possible!

[a6282]

I like this version of his Chopin Polonaise the best. What a performance at age 83!

[kasyapa]

where he summoned that energy from, we do not know - but would like to.

[vrljikkerssfesst]

one question: are you a Filipino?

[kasyapa]

no. why?

[vrljikkerssfesst]

oh, ok..... just asking....

[kasyapa]

why? why not ask if i were indian or swedish?

[vrljikkerssfesst]

no, because your username here, "kasyapa" means "it still fits"... so, i assumed that u are a filipino...

[kasyapa]

ah! i named myself after buddha's lay disciple, kasyapa, the founder of zen.

[vrljikkerssfesst]

ah, ok......

[Powerslider]

wow. chopin is amazing..

[kasyapa]

one of the rarest, i think. i've got some more moscow video to put up when i can get the tapes out of storage, but nothing great - a long shot of him and wanda walking through the airport!

[kingleon1616]

ITS A VAMPIRE!!!!!!!!!!!! Lol 5 stars

[kasyapa]

he certainly gave life. :)

[henryhar]

well done--such energy!

[clivez1]

Shostakovitch died in 1975 so I doubt it.

[leomulder]

This is great! Wasn't it published in CD?

[rabengeraun]

Better than the live performance which had a few "blips" but even that overshadowed all other younger pianists attempts!

[piedijon]

Barbara walters ruined everything.

[Spiritakis]

Fascinating clip and what a performance!

DG must be ashamed for cutting this piece from the CD "Horowitz in Moscow". They redeemed themselves to some extent by realising "The Last concert" in Hamburg so that we can have another stunning live performance of this polonaise from Horowitz late years. It's completely different than his early recordings for Columbia and RCA but it's by no means less powerful and enchanting.

Thank you, kasyapa!

[Timmytimtimtm]

who was the guy at the end with white hair and big framed glasses ? looked like Shostakovich ?

[kasyapa]

that i do not know. maybe i can ask a russian musicologist. incidentally, those audience shots are the same audience shots in the "official" concert that was released on video - they're cheated-in. :)

[Timmytimtimtm]

cool, well if u asked let me know, don't forget about me...

[ewedude]

holy s...! here's a perfect example of what the magic sounds like, missed notes and all.

[lisztbest]

the god of the piano!!!!

[rmpc73]

wow just amazing. He is so old and he ownz on the piano

[ilovemingmingg]

Wonderful

[banchieri10]

Horowitz è unico.... come interpreta lui chopin solo pochi ce la possono fare.. fantastico!!!

[serox901]

the mic must be right next to the piano, this is loud, even for him.

[kasyapa]

probably not right next, but not as far away as an audience-ear would be. remember that (as i emphasize here and there) many piano videos are volume-leveled, which squashes dynamic extremes and materially distorts the interpretation. for a really loud rendition, likewise volume-leveled, see the 1978 white house rehearsal of this piece and the "carmen" variations i have up.

[audiophile71]

I love all of Horowitz's performances of this piece but I haven't heard one yet where he didn't miss a note or two! Oh boy it is hard to do this one right!!! His performances were supurbly interesting nevertheless.

[kasyapa]

he was sanguine about wrong notes - he considered it more important to take risks and express strong feeling. however, there are a number of live performances showing not one flubbed note, not even a part of one. i have some of them up.:)

[Mortimer123]

kasyapa - Didn't he use to say he doesn't want to sound like Jascha Heifetz, i.e. note-perfect? Good for him, I say. But he could get oddly picky when it came to publishing recordings of live performances that had wrong notes in them - witness 1965. Thank God that recital was re-released without touchups.

[JimiHendrixANDVADER]

Also, look how old he is.

[brtherjohn]

The Leningrad performance which was done a couple of days after the Moscow performances were even better than this!

[libetta]

his hands weren't as big as rachmaninoff's, as far as i noticed. i bet he can reach 10 notes.

[ljoekelsoey4]

rach could reach 12ths or 13ths i think, i can reach 10ths and my hands aren't really that big.

[libetta]

me too. i can reach an 11th but fully stretched. how long are your hands from the palm up?

[lentoagitato]

i think it was 13ths that rach could play...man i would kill to have bigger hands i only can reach 8ths! its always a struggle to play rach and even chopin

[ljoekelsoey4]

chopin played on a smaller piano, hes hands werent as big as his music lets on :P

[lentoagitato]

ooo that makes me feel a lil better :D

[SCHneiDen777]

well, as history has it, Chopin had incredible flexibility in his hands. Do your stretches! Maybe thats why chopin hated Liszt for having so many octaves in his earlier works, and added things, cus Chopins hands were too small too! No, i dont think so haha. And i think Liszt took his girl. (that bastard Liszt haha)

[nassosmichas]

@SCHneiDen777 haha I didn't know about the gossip with the girl :D However, Chopin had once said that "I have to steal the way Liszt plays my Etudes" ;)

[Pladask]

Correct, Horowitz could reach a 10th.

[laqin007]

i can reach 11

lol but not like press down the whole 11th but i can reach it. i can press exactly down to 10th.

[tempact482]

marvelous

[kasyapa]

truly one of his finest.

[GreatPianists]

Oh my...Just mindblowing.

I daresay it's the greatest I've ever heard of this giant and difficult work...

[kasyapa]

that makes me smile. i saw this performance first in 1986-1987 and was blown away. his fire was never hotter than here.

[IAMLISZT]

perfect octaves, god gotta love the improvement from the japan concert.

[kasyapa]

a miraculous return of life. he sounded great in the '85 carnegie return concert when i heard him, too.

[amishan92]

Very good performance, better than the one he gave in the actual concert, in my opinion!

[kasyapa]

very much agreed - that was noted at the time. he was strong and more daring here.

[wlprwell]

speedy!!! More that Martha!

[kasyapa]

he really gives it his all - like he was waiting all this time.

[Jeroentje6713]

The video quality is very bad, but you can still here Horowitz's playing it very well. Especially at 01:28. Just great!

[kasyapa]

i would love to find a pristine tape - with audio to match. i'm sure there are some tapes out there in russia, recorded from audience - they seemed to be very okay with that in the old slave state.

[lonewolf604]

yeah i know he usually has lighter touch

[kasyapa]

do you find it too heavy? i think it's thrilling passionate - less scatty than his performances of this piece are. driving, indomitable.

[lonewolf604]

well i think its just the video quality i cant tell

[cziffra1980]

He's going for it, in terms of strength of sound, but it terms of character it's actually one the plainest performances of the work I've heard from him. The tempo is rigid and there's not the usual variety or shape. It almost reminds me of Kissin's playing- all heavy and no real sense of going anywhere (because there's almost nowhere left to go). Is it the sound quality?

[kasyapa]

interesting how perceptions differ. i hear heroic drive and a new kind of interpretation. but you know the piano well, too. i'm not sure about how much of an influence the sound quality has - the performance of the next day wasn't sterling - i much prefer this one, or the later video in vienna.

[cziffra1980]

Yeah, it may be to do with the sound quality but it seems very level to me. I like the earlier recordings best. I hear energy going into this and there but the sound gives me the impression that he wasn't offering the same variety as normal. I prefer when he holds something right back, leaving room to explode after. I'm sure his rhythm was rarely so straight in this piece though. I find it too unyielding in places where he normally eases up before to vary the character.

[kasyapa]

as for the evenness, my guess is that this is due to volume-leveling circuitry in the camera microphones. the concert of the next day show a wide dynamic range, and the vienna video of the next year even more so. this was a recurring problem for horowitz, as with the 1978 white house concert - the t.v. people, as the plaskin bio says, pushed his sound through a compressor

or something and it came out very even.

[kasyapa]

(cont.) the same thing happens when i've recorded myself in the videos you see here on y/t, because the vidcam has volume-leveling circuitry. something to be wary of when listening to pirated tapes - sometimes the mic signals were fed through levelers.

[cziffra1980]

Odd. He's really pounding it out here, but there's nowhere near the degree of shape that you'd expect from him. Still great though.

[tompilk]

incredible stuff...

[kasyapa]

i've never heard him play it better. miles ahead of his performance taped on "60 minutes" in 1977, though he may have been holding back in '77 for the liszt sonata.