"you know ,I could put you all into one melting pot, but you still could not make one Jospeh Lhevinne" -Ferruccio Busoni to a gathering of his students .
@gemma harden I played for Mme. Lhevinne a little over 60 years ago and she told me "When Vladimir Horowitz was here, he told me that after hearing my Josef's recording of the g#-minor Etude, he decided he would never again play it in public." I love both their playing and I think it's hard to say one was better than the other. Remember, Lhevinne and Rachmaninoff were at the Moscow Conservatory together and Lhevinne got the Piano Prize. For me, Rachmaninoff, Lhevinne, Horowitz and Josef Hofmann are the best pianists I've ever heard, just considering pure instrumental mastery. There are others who were/are close by that measure -- Gould and Martha Argerich for example. Sokolov is phenomenal. Richter was, too.
Wow l'op. 25 / 6 "sur une seule tierce" est tout simplement prodigieuse ! À mon sens elle arrive sur le podium des 3 meilleures versions de toute l'histoire du Piano
Kultivierte und zugleich spannende Interpretation dieser fein komponierten Etüden im inspirierenden Tempo mit gut artikulierten Töne des Klaviers und sorgfältig kontrollierter Dynamik. Genialer Pianist!
Awesome! Absolute benchmark performances. I once read Lhevinne could get up in the morning and go straight to the piano and play Liszt's Feux Follets perfectly, at the correct tempo, without any warmup exercises or scales first.
@@FKemp-uo9no Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present by Harold C Schonberg (I believe, but it could have been one of Rachmaninoffs biographies since they were good friends) I believe you might also find interesting that Rachmaninoff first practiced scales in order to warm up but that Abram Chasins once heard him practicing Chopins thirds etude so slowly it took 45 minutes to play it one time.
The greatest pianists of All Time Are really Artur Rubinstein ( The God) Grigory Sokolov ( The Titan The Giant of The piano) Emil Gilels ( The King) Wilhelm Kempff Radu Lupu Mikhail Pletnev Maurizio Pollini Sviatoslav Richter Vladimir Ashkenazy Alexei Lubimov Stanislav Igolinsky ( better than Lipatti and Joseph Hofman) Solomon Cutner Maria Grinberg Natalia Trull Rosa Tamarkina Ekaterina Novitskaya Dimitri Bashkirov Andrei Gavrilov Victor Eresko Lubov Timofeeva
No one comes near this cat on Op. 25 Etudes No. 6 and No. 11. to me, his only equal is Ignaz Friedman. It gives you a an insight as to what Chopin and Liszt must have sounded like. Both of these Etudes are physically very changeling.
Iso Ellinson, David Saperton, and David Bar Illan, all played the no. 6 in thirds faster than Lhevinne. Bar-Illan was the fastest, and Ellinson the most even. From a musical point of view, I'll still take Lhevinne because of his subtle mastery of light and shade.
@gemma harden Trifonov compared with Lhevinne??? That's like comparing the distance between Earth and moon and Earth and the next galaxy. Impossible to compare the two levels in how Lhevinne was that much better than Trifonov.
gemma harden in a recording of Schumann’s Carnaval Godowsky fails in several places that the average conservatory student today can play with eyes closed. Rachmaninoff plays without trouble the sections Godowksy is helpless in. As to Horowitz, his so-called great technique has always been a myth. Horowitz didn’t even have the best technique of his day, much less a technique comparable to Lhevinne, or god forbid Hamelin. It is said that in his younger days Horowitz could play the Liszt Don Juan fabulously, but that piece is effortlessly played by advanced students today. Respectfully, Horowitz’s technique is stupendously overrated. His unique approach to certain pieces could be charming, however.
@@leomiller2291 Perhaps your assessment of Horowitz would be correct if technique was just about playing the written notes correctly, but surely it's much harder to define than that. For example, Horowitz plays the Chopin mazurkas like no-one else (others are of course fantastic too, but in different ways). One might say that the Chopin mazurkas are not difficult because there's not many notes, but if Horowitz is the only one able to draw out of them what he does then I'd say that must be very difficult and clearly requires special understanding (or 'technique'). Either way, I think trying to rank pianists according to the hazily defined term technique is pointless as the conclusion from that would be, as many people like to point out, that MIDI programs are by far the best players of the piano.
@@tomcarterpianist I don't think Horowitz was much of an interpreter of Chopin and have never heard him connected to the mazurkas. Friedman is a far superior interpeter of Chopin and it's often said that his performance of the mazurkas is unsurpassed. A big level up from Horowitz as an interpreter. Friedman takes you into the world of Chopin.
@@alanmadeira-metz1380 I, for one, specifically dislike Friedman for his eccentric, liberal alterations of Chopin's rhythms and even harmonies in the mazurkas and that happens everywhere. In short Friedman was not faithful to Chopin's scores at all.
Joseph Lhevinne approach to pianistic "mechanics" is simple though very effective, particularly for long fingers like mine: fingers must be firm and the only articulation is at first joint. If you do this you can vay the color of your sound playing with curved, less curved, and long (almost straight) fingers. Less curved fingers give you the double crotchets in mozart Concertos for instance...Or Chopin "Jeu perlé), With straight fingers you enter the world of ppp (listen to Horowitz and you will see what I mean)
