When you turn on modern virtuoso pianists (about 70% of them are Chinese), everything is great, but it never even crossed my mind to go look for the sheet music because they just don’t play anything even remotely at my level. If I were to start learning today, I might barely manage the first two pages by retirement.
But with Horowitz, it’s a completely different story. For the third time on my playlist, I come across pieces that are technically manageable, which I immediately rush to the internet to download and print for myself, thinking, how did I miss these before? And for the third time, I realize that in these seemingly simple pieces, Horowitz sets such a “bar” in performance, in sound, in the character of the performance, that all that seeming simplicity evaporates (and maybe by retirement, I’ll manage two pages).
Today, I printed out four pages of Consolation No. 3 in D-Flat Major by Franz Liszt. It’s very beautiful and not very difficult technically, but to play even close to Horowitz…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGDJZgQPK8E
But that’s for later. Right now, I’m learning a short piece, Träumerei by Robert Schumann. It’s the same story — technically simple, but not at all simple in its sound.. especially after listening to Horowitz… The link is in the comments.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 