When Carnegie Hall promoted artists
mainMikhail Kaykov has come up with this extraordinarily rare and wonderfully shot film, promoting a Claudio Arrau recital.
Electrifying.
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A treasure. Thanks for sharing.
By coincidence I was listening last night to the Appassionata in his 1954 SWR live recording – I think the most persuasive of his various versions [SWR19054CD; five discs]
over-rated ‘pianist’
Thank you, thank you!!!! This sounds extraordinarily beautiful. It made my day.
Arrau was a wonderful player in much of the repertoire (I admire his Debussy in particular), but I couldn’t quite get into his playing on this video clip.
Perhaps the hard piano sound, as recorded, got in the way of my enjoyment. I don’t remember Baldwin pianos as being particularly hard sounding instruments – I owned a six-foot Baldwin many many moons ago and it was mellow.
The sound quality is poor — as if recorded in NBC Studio 8H — but the artistry still comes through, to my ears at least.
Interesting to see that he’s playing a Baldwin, but then on another site I learned that he went to Baldwins for a brief time in the 1950s. Apparently this performance dates from that period.
As a freshman college student from a very small town, I discovered his recordings by chance. Certainly the technique was dazzling, and the artistry drew me in, but I was most taken by the wonder of what music-making could really be. I knew I would never play as well as Arrau, but I certainly worked harder to follow the example and still do to this day.
A musician and pianist of a lost age
Does anyone know how/where this film — and I guess others like it — were used? Were they shown on local television in New York City?
I heard him at the Festival Hall around that time, I was young, he played a Beethoven concerto with Klemp conducting, I was close up too, front row cheap seat.
Arrau w. Klemperer: Testament set now seems to be deleted although is still listed by amazon.co.uk
Other occasional or contracted Baldwin players were Jose Iturbi, Jorge Bolet, and Benno Moiseiwitsch, though many photos of their keyboards are iuspiciously air-brushed
.
I hadn’t heard Arrau’s piece for so long that I wrestled with Weber before settling on that old recital staple, Mendelssohn’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, facilely played without much subtlety and too prominent left hand in this film.
Arrau made good records in the`1940s of “Kreisleriana” and Beethoven’s”Eroica” Variations Op. 35 and F-major variations Op .34, each of the latter exceptionally in a different key. I liked his Beethoven but prferred Cortot and Moiseiwitsch in “Kreisleriana”, and lived to see Moiseiwitsch play it, while Cortot played “Carnaval” and the Symphonic Etudes with five posthumous etudes at his only recital I ever saw.
So beautifully played, a true artist.
A king amongst pianists.