Search - Emil Gilels, Brahms, Chopin :: Emil Gilels 3 (III) (Great Pianists of the Century series) - Brahms / Chopin / Clementi / Grieg / Schubert / Schumann (2 CDs)

Music- not Notes

12/22/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This complete misconception that missed notes is a sign of nerves or lack of practice is entirely false. Modern preformers are expected to be note perfect without fail, and quite frankly, it's completely amusical. Because there's no way at all to hit every last note right AND play an extremely expressive preformance- it's on or the other I think. It simply takes too much effort to devote that kind of attention to the notes. All the old school musicians, Horowitz, Richter, Fitz-Kriesler, Menuhin, Rachmoninov all made mistakes on recordings! Big ones too! But it didn't matter, and THEY didn't care. Because they'd rather make music than play notes. And there wasn't this inhuman expectation that all the notes be %100 with out a single fault while preforming in front of thousands of people putting your whole career on the line.
The best recording I have is Menuhin playing the bach sonatas and partitas. And he misses shifts! Flat out misses them and is distinctly out of tune. But it doesn't matter, because it's a small price to pay because he, instead of jsut placing the NOTE where it should be, he went for it and made music and just blindly jumped for the note. 9 times out 10 he hits it, but since hes human he misses sometimes. Oh well.
Besides, the point of music is to connect, and to have a human to human experiance. With all this perfection note perfect bull, the audience is completely removed from the preformer. They look up to him or her and the preformer looks down on the audience. "I'm listening to you only because I can't do it myself" is the modern attitude of music, and it is quite disconcerting. Music should be "He has something to say, he has a message that I can relate to, he's just like me"
Of course a sloppy preformance can be horrible- but sloppyness of understanding is different than sloppyness of a few cracks here and there."

Genius in the Act of Creation

Jeffrey K. Lurie | Cleveland OH USA | 01/16/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The selections on the final volumes of Emil Gilels' entries in the Great Pianists of the 20th Century series are justifiedly famous. My impression, after my first listening, was that these performances: the Brahms 2d, the two Chopin sonatas-didn't sound like other recordings of the pieces I had in my collection (Rubenstein; Szell/Serkin). After subsequent listenings, however, I realized that Gilels' rendition of all of these works are simply acts of interpretive genius.There is a dispute among the other reviewers of this set as to whether occasional wrong notes diminish the value of these performances. My vote is a resounding "No! Listening to Gilels here (oftentimes in "live" recording) is to hear Genius in the act of creation. Sometimes creation can be messy and rarely is it note perfect. However, this is playing to inspire awe and Gilels is part mad chemist and part thoroughbred, striding through performance with strength, speed and grace. It just doesn't get better than this."

Gilels is one of the best

Hammerklavier | 03/06/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Back in the good old days, when pianists (from Godowsky, Rachmaninoff, Moisewitsch, Hofmann, and Lhevinne to Horowitz, Richter, and Rubinstein) worshipped in the temples of musicality, pianoplaying was in its golden age. And with the deaths of the Three Great Masters (Horowitz, Arrau, and Serkin), things fell apart. That was primarily because teachers and scholars began to urge pupils to play like robots; practicing until the student could play in their sleep, trying not to hit a single wrong note, and spending hours on mere technical exercises. And surely enough, pianism was reprsented by a mob of robots. With two great exceptions in Pollini and Kissin (they are the only ones managing to keep the legacies of Schnabel and Gilels alive), pianists soon forgot the meaning of emotion and sentiment in their interpretations, choosing to focus on pure technique instead. And yet not a single pianist has even come close to compare with the technique of a Backhaus, Cziffra, Horowitz, or even a Cortot. One may listen to some recordings by Kapell (such as the Chopin Nocturne, op.9, no.1) Gilels (among many, the recording of the two Chopin Sonatas found in this compilation), Arrau (Liszt's Vallee d'Obermann), Rachmaninoff (the Man Lebt nur Einmal transcription by Tausig), and find themselves swept-over by these pianists' stupendous performances, performances that have largely vanished from the face of the Earth. Will there be a pianist, someday, who will lead the piano like a Franz Liszt into a new age of glory? I sincerely hope so."