The recital given yesterday evening at the Free Trade Hall seems to have been the last of Mr. Paderewski's art that we are likely to hear for some time. He is not expected to visit Manchester again during the next few years, and the occasion therefore seems fitting for a more general discussion of his playing than is usual in a simple notice of a recital. No doubt Mr. Paderewski is, on the whole, the most distinguished executive musician now before the public. The Paderewski "craze" in England and America is not a mere matter of fashion and folly, but is shared by experts and brethren of the craft, many of whom are irresistibly fascinated by Mr. Paderewski's playing, even while they disapprove of much that he does. Why will he insist on using a pianoforte with so hard a tone? Why is the skelp of his hand on the keys so frequently audible from the most distant point of the hall, as a sound quite separate from the musical notes? Why does he never play Bach? Why does he always play Liszt's second Rhapsodie? Such are a few among the searchings of heart to which Mr. Paderewski's public performances give rise, and to none of them—probably—is there a complete and satisfactory answer. The shallow-toned instrument admits of greater clearness in the bass, and has a more scintillating kind of brilliancy in the upper octaves, and Mr. Paderewski, who likes all passage-work a little staccato, naturally favours it. The rage of his "con gran bravura" lends greater charm to his grazioso style, by the principle of contrast—a point on which he often lays emphasis by rapid alternations of the two styles. Iteration of show pieces, such as the second Rhapsodie, is excusable in a pianist who is incessantly touring the two worlds and playing to all sorts and conditions of men by land and by sea. As to the Bach question we know nothing. He may even have played Bach in other parts of the world. Mr. Paderewski's distinguishing quality is a certain extraordinary energy—not merely a one-sided physical, or even a two-sided physical and intellectual, energy; it is of the fingers and wrists, of the mind, the imagination, the heart, and the soul, and it makes Mr. Paderewski the most interesting of players, even though to the extreme kind of specialist, absorbed in problems of tone-production, he is not the most absolute master of his instrument at the present day. His art has a certain princely quality. It is indescribably galant and chevaleresque. He knows all the secrets of all the most subtle dancing rhythms. He is a reincarnation of Chopin, with almost the added virility of a Rubinstein. No wonder such a man fascinates, bewilders, and enchants the public! Greatly surpassed by Busoni in the interpretation of Beethoven, by Pachmann in the touch that persistently draws forth roundness, sweetness, and fulness of tone, and by Godowsky in the mastery of intricate line and the power of sucking out the very last drop of melody from every part of a composition, Paderewski still remains the most brilliant, fascinating, and successfully audacious of present-day musical performers, and in preferring him the general public is probably right, though the keen student of the pianoforte in particular may learn more from Godowsky, and the earnest lover of the musical classics in general, more from Busoni.
The programme of yesterday's recital was on the usual lines, except in regard to the Paganini Variations by Brahms, of which a selection from the two volumes were played with astounding dash and incisiveness. The unfamiliar Fantasia by Schumann was made perhaps a little more interesting than any other player could have made it. Beethoven's C sharp minor Sonata was given in a manner typical of Mr. Paderewski's Beethoven renderings, except that there happens to be nothing in the first and second movements that is alien to his Slavonic temperament. The finale, belonging to that element in Beethoven which appeals to a more broadly based human nature, sounded flimsy. The Chopin and Liszt pieces were all splendidly done. The long-continued demonstrations of enthusiasm in the latter part of the recital led to three additional pieces, namely, a Nocturne of the performer's own composition, the inevitable Rhapsodie aforementioned, and Chopin's A flat Waltz, with a mixture of double and triple time.
Godowsky.
March 17, 1903.
It is a little difficult to do justice to the qualities of Mr. Godowsky's pianoforte playing without at the same time saying too much and making claims that are not justified by the facts. It must be remembered that there is no Liszt or Rubinstein at the present day. Those men were giants—mighty personalities who dominated the musical world, being essentially great as well as good players. The present generation has no such personality among solo performers. Talents that come to the top show a specialising tendency, and it is no longer possible to say that so-and-so is the greatest pianist of the age. One can only say that Mr. Busoni is the greatest musician who now plays pianoforte solos in public, and Mr. Paderewski is the most brilliant performer on the pianoforte, and Mr. Godowsky the most absolute expert in tone production on the same instrument. It is not to be denied that, taking Mr. Godowsky's art as a whole, and thus including musical conception, one finds it imposing. He never comes within a measurable distance of bad style: he always gives an essentially good rendering of anything that he undertakes to perform. But what one principally admires is not his mind, imagination, or temperament, but simply his hands—his warm, subtle, and preternaturally deft wrists and fingers. Having apparently been warned that the peculiar acoustic of the hall has a tendency to make any pianoforte sound as if the pedal were down nearly all the time, he yesterday avoided the bewilderingly elaborate style of which he has made a speciality. But, in addition to the flawless perfection of all the passage work, there was abundant opportunity in the series of pieces by Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt to admire that marvellous control of tone which often enables him to reveal fresh melody in quite familiar compositions. The pieces that were least affected by the cross reverberations of the hall were the Etude in extended chords and the C sharp minor Scherzo by Chopin. On the other hand, no one who has not heard Mr. Godowsky under more favourable circumstances can imagine, from the experience of yesterday evening, the magical effect of his performance in the G sharp minor Etude in thirds for the right hand. In playing the exquisite F minor Concert Etude by Liszt he deliberately kept the tone down to a minimum, to avoid the buzz and confusion as far as possible. Liszt's transcription of the "Tannhäuser" Overture was used for the display piece that audiences expect at the end of a recital. It is characteristic of Mr. Godowsky that his favourite amusement is making rearrangements of Chopin's Etudes—the "Godowsky Bedevilments," Mr. Huneker calls them. These include the celebrated combination of the two G flat Etudes, where the left hand has to play the one in the first book while the right plays the legato and staccato improvisation from the second volume, and another in which three Etudes in A minor are brought together contrapuntally. Though they are all of course anathema to the purist, the ingenuity displayed in some of these things is so prodigious that no one interested in pianoforte playing can well be indifferent to them.
Lamond.
December 15, 1903.
Mr. Frederic Lamond's strongest points as a pianist are not those which the wider public most readily appreciates. He is not one of the pianistic experts in the narrower sense, like Messrs. Pachmann and Godowsky, for whom neat fingering and smooth tone-production are much more important than musical interpretation. Mr. Lamond is before all things a virile player. His style is broad and a little severe. He lacks the peculiar grace and charm of Mr. Paderewski in the treatment of dancing rhythm no less obviously than that faculty, akin to a Japanese juggler's, which enables Mr. Pachmann to bring from the pianoforte a tone more smooth and sweet than was ever before imagined possible. Mr. Lamond's qualities are entirely different. Plastic force, technical and imaginative grasp of the greater composers' greater ideas, a deep and powerful but rather rough tone—these are the characteristics of his playing, and they are characteristics better appreciated in Germany than in this country, where music-lovers think too much of the merely smooth and the merely deft and the "sweetly pretty." It is rather surprising that neither of his recent performances in Manchester should have included any example of Beethoven, of whose greater Sonatas Mr. Lamond is now probably the best living interpreter, with the possible exception of Mr. Busoni. He was of course quite right to play plenty of Liszt, but it may be regretted that he gave so much of the later Liszt—who, conscious of himself as the world-famous magician of the piano, often improvised on rather poor themes, as if to show that any theme, however weak, could be made interesting by his transcendental style of ornamentation—rather than the earlier Liszt who wrote things of such power and eloquence as the "Mazeppa" Etude. Mr. Lamond's mind seems recently to have been running on Liszt's Tarantelle Fantasias. He played the "Venezia e Napoli" Tarantelle at the Hallé Concert and the "Muette de Portici" Tarantelle yesterday—both pieces which are chiefly of interest as proving that Liszt could improvise effectively upon any conceivable sort of thematic material. It would have been much more interesting to hear the "Mazeppa," which Mr. Lamond played in the composer's presence and to his evident satisfaction when last he was in London, a few months before his death in 1886, or some piece in that pregnant early manner. His best performance yesterday was in Chopin's A flat Polonaise—a composition of such excellence that, hackneyed as it is, it cannot in a good rendering fail to give pleasure. Mr. Lamond did full justice to the majestic beauty of the themes, which are all absolutely good, and brought out the famous basso ostinato section in some respects better than we have heard it done since Rubinstein's death. He did not adopt any of the revised versions of the left-hand octave passages favoured by certain distinguished modern performers. On the other hand, he did adopt Rubinstein's version of the ending, with the unexpected and telling chord of C major just before the final phrase. In Rubinstein's F minor Barcarolle—so interesting in rhythm, so original in colouring—Mr. Lamond was not entirely successful, his temperament apparently not furnishing a key to the vein of lyrism in which the piece is conceived. Yet in Liszt's "Liebestraum" he was perfect, though one might have expected that his Beethovenish tastes would have rebelled against the hothouse atmosphere of the composition. The opening performance of Schumann's "Carnaval" was powerful and distinguished, but too broad in style to be in keeping with the sub-title "Scènes mignonnes." On neither of these recent occasions has Mr. Lamond played anything of his own, though he has composed plenty of effective stuff for his instrument. He is beyond all question by far the most distinguished pianist of British extraction that has yet arisen.