Word: schnabel
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During the 1930s, most of the long-eared musical world was playing a waiting game. Famed Austrian Pianist Artur Schnabel was slowly recording his way through the Beethoven sonatas-Schnabel would no more hurry a recording session than he would a Beethoven tempo-and each new disk was an event. The whole series ranked as a masterpiece. Schnabel died in 1951, and his old 78 r.p.m. records soon became obsolete in the LP age. Last week Victor brought him back in his finest reincarnation, a package containing all 32 sonatas on 13 LPs, plus Schnabel's own meticulous edition...
Beethoven was the first composer to make use of ugly sounds in abstract music, the first to make notes speak in everyday prose, to stamp and rave, and stand still to make philosophical statements, and Pianist Schnabel was temperamentally capable of bringing all of these qualities into line with Beethoven's more appealing side. Beethoven was also the first composer to become a bourgeois hero and one of the first upon whom the stupefying epithet "great" was popularly bestowed, an event that forecast the beginning of the present sorry condition of concert music-during the last hundred years...
...Schnabel's playing was never note-perfect, but his performances on these disks have something so compelling that mere perfection would seem paltry by comparison. The recorded sound transferred from the old disks varies from good to barely acceptable by modern standards, despite the labors of Victor engineers. The package sells for a luxurious $80, a price that does not preclude some annoying corner-cutting: the sonatas are crammed together, one starting wherever the previous one leaves off, as if the listener were going to stack the entire 32 sonatas on his changer and run them through chronologically...
...scene at an ideal time. The son of Russian-born professional singers, he studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia under Pianist Rudolf Serkin. The U.S. was then benefiting from the wartime influx of great European artists. Says Istomin: "Every time I heard men like Rubinstein. Artur Schnabel, Horowitz, or Bruno Walter. I felt as though artistically I had robbed the city bank of New York. We were a very lucky generation...
That was in 1917. Young Avner Carmi went on to become a piano tuner (he worked for the late great Artur Schnabel, among others), and when his travels took him to Italy in the '30s, he tried to carry out his grandfather's wish. The famous piano was there, all right. It had been built around 1800 in Turin by piano-makers named Marchisio and a woodcarver named Ferri. Decades later, the city council of Siena had presented it to Crown Prince Umberto (later King Umberto I) as a wedding present. It seemed within Carmi's reach...