Triple Bach: Does it get any better?
Daily Comfort ZonePablo Casals conducts a gloriously old-fashioned 1971 performance of J. S. Bach’s concerto for three keyboards and orchestra, staged at the United Nations building in New York.
The soloists are Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Eugene Istomin and Rudolf Serkin. I use this video as aversion therapy for Historically Informed Performance sufferers.
The page-turner on the left in pigtails must be a great-grandma by now.
There is actually an even older CBS LP where R.Serkin and M. Horszowski perform both Bach´s Triple-concertos together with P.Serkin an R.Laredo, the Marlboro Festival Orchestra conducted by A.Schneider I find even finer.
What an awful sound balance. One Piano drowning out the rest.
I love Casals and Serkin but it sounds like the strings are behind the beat and the pianos are struggling to stay in sync. Not for me, personally.
Isaac Stern and Alexander Schneider played the Bach Double Concerto at the same concert.
Despite the starry pianists in this work/video, I much prefer it with period harpsichords which come off lightly, as opposed to the overwhelming percussive sound of the modern pianoforte. The double concertos somehow work with pianofortes if not performed with heavy hands a la Serkin.
Not to my taste and my aversion is to inauthentic performances, HIP or not. I first encountered this piece when Solti was one of the soloists at a CSO concert (it was a subscription concert but I do not remember when – I attended 19 seasons of the Solti and Barenboim years). It employed harpsichords, as I remember. As with this recording, the balance is wrong and the instruments are wrong. Good playing by the soloists, but through a romantic lens and occasionally out of sync with the orchestra. It is all about the pianists and less about Bach. It’s chambre music given the full orchestral treatment. Valid, but again, not to my taste.
Like something out of the stone age. A testament to great names not always making great music together.
The idea of using three Steinway concert grands, without any lids yet, does not make a persuasive case for Bach on the piano.
Some of these comments here sound like Monty Python dialogue! Priceless!
An abomination unto the Lord
For all my admiration of the protagonists this is ridiculous as it is dismal.
When i hear this i think of my father’s distaste for modern performances; he was very “old school,” Bach was played on the pianoforte with lots of pedal, the harpisschord was an abomination. Equally, he preferred Handel oratorios à la Victoriana, heavy, overweight Shuddersfield Choral Society-style rendings. But whatever one’s taste, i think this version confirms Bach as the most “malleable” of musicians, adaptable to different instruments and styles of interpretation. Honestly, with all its faults, i don’t find it quite as bad as some commenters here have implied! A document of its time.
Shostakovich and Nikolayeva recorded this too, together with Pavel Serebriakov
Serkin made his ‘debut’ playing piano (no harpsichord) in Brandenburg 5 with Busch conducting. Called back he played Bach ‘Goldberg’ Variations as encore…