COMPARISONS ARE INSTRUCTIVE
IF anyone ever asks me, years from now, where I was the night former President I Nixon hit the road, I will have a ready answer: I was present at another historic occasion, Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha's only solo appearance in the 1974 season's Mostly Mozart concert series. I will remember the event partly because the management of New York's Avery Fisher Hall sensibly played the President's resignation speech for the derisively a-historical audience over the public-address system during intermission (apt timing!), but mostly because it was one of those faultlessly rare and perfectly incandescent musical evenings that deserve to be called historic.
There is history and history, of course, and there is no reason, other than the coincidence of chronology and technology, why these two occurrences should even seem to be in competition, but there is no doubt in my mind which made the greater impression on me.
As befits the "mostly Mozart" theme of the series, Miss De Larrocha lifted the audience boldly and peremptorily into the empyrean at once with two of that com poser's sonatas (K. 330, K. 311), and surprisingly raised us even further with Schubert's enormous and enormously difficult B-flat Sonata in the second wiping out, for the music's duration at least, any memory of the intermission-surely a tough act to follow. Since we could scarcely be set loose on the streets in that elevated condition, we were brought back to earth with three encores drawn from a less exalted repertoire: two Spanish dances by Granados plus the Falla Ritual Fire-Dance.
There is a remarkable difference in demeanor between Miss De Larrocha and her audiences, she straightforward and businesslike, a crack typist going about her chores with a coolly dignified efficiency, they quite beside themselves with unbuttoned enthusiasm. But she refuses to be impressed with herself, a most endearing trait in any great artist. And that is why standing ovations are the rule at De Larrocha concerts, an almost palpable surge of love and gratitude welling up out of the orchestra and spilling onto the stage in great billowing combers.
It is just that sense of heightened musical and emotional awareness, certainly, that makes the "live" concert experience so peculiarly memorable and so different from listening to recorded music. There are other differences too, both historical (a live performance is unique and unrepeatable) and practical (the dynamic range-in the present case, the Schubert-often defies adequate recording and/or reproduction). But recordings have their intense pleasures, their unique satisfactions as well, principal among them being that very repeatability the "historical" live performance denies us, a boon which brings with it the opportunity to make some revealing and instructive comparisons. For ready (and apropos) example, I have been listening of late to two recent recordings--Jorge Bolet's Carnegie Hall recital (reviewed last month) and Alicia de Larrocha's "Mostly Mozart" album (reviewed in this issue). Both contain performances of that stupendous piece of musical wonder, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne. Both are serenely beautiful, intelligently probing, greatly moving--and quite, quite different. Miss De Larrocha's approach is passionately Dionysian, and she finds in the work (as she does everywhere, even in the Schubert sonata mentioned above) the vital dance element, humidly Mediterranean, that lies beyond Bach in the chaconne's dim prehistory. Jorge Bolet, however, without sacrificing an iota of the piece's awful cosmological grandeur, is cooler, drier, aristocratic, and gracefully Apollonian-returning, perhaps, to Bach's great violin original. And what of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who plays the Chaconne, as he does everything else, with the stately finality of a Man from Mars, as if no other interpretations existed? Who is right? Why, everybody! The Chaconne is an infinitely faceted jewel with a new aspect for every light, and the variety of its reflections is inexhaustible. It would take us many a season to discover this for ourselves if all we had to rely on were rare live performances and fickle memory.
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