A performance so colorful - I don't think I have seen any other videos of the same piece in RU-vid as colorful as this. Doesn't it make you amazed at 4:23?
He plays with such ease. With this technique, you can play anything, and make it sound a breeze. And he never poses or shows off. The prelude from Bach's English Concerto is another example. That's what I want to sound like, or would :) Pogo is the man! "You don't come to my concerts before dinner."
If he had written this composition it would've been the top performance. I'd not call it "horrible", though. It's something worse, it's anachronistic for its stale slow segments with overblown pianissimos and the torn metrorhytmic line. As the result, the pulse of music departs and the piece calmly dies. There's no arc, the texture is holed. His rendering sounds amateurish in its formalism and disregard for the spirit in favour of the form. Juvenile maximalism at best. Composer and performer Ivo Pogorelich. Ballade No.1 and only.
Horowitz himself said it was the hardest piece and he would never play it live. I think a lot of pianists would think the same. Took me a few months to get it right personally. Very well done. You made it look easy !
The tempo of the opening section is so excruciatingly slow as to sound positively endless, with the possible result of the listener losing interest before the following "action" section even occurs. This is pretentiousness on a grand scale, although there'll no doubt be Ivo fans who perceive this lugubrious interpretation as profound and sublime.
