Claudio Arrau

Anyone like this pianist? I have no problem loving almost all well-recognized pianist, except Arrau. I wonder why is he considered great. His technique is quite dirty and rough as compared to most great pianist, and there is an obvious lack of passion and power in his playing. Am I just the only one who think so? Another "boring" pianist is Ashkenazy....

Arrau was actually one of the last pianists of the 20th century to represent a direct link with the 19 century.I think his style of interpreting was actually closer to near the end of 19 century where pianists liked to create a performance not with strict rules on the way of interpreting,but was much like a spontaneous improvisation (and it is really difficult to play a chopin etude or Islamey by Balakirev and make it sound like it is not a written piece but it is an spontaneous improvisation).I think someone like this was also Shurra Sherkasky Now the main reason many people do not like the recordings of Arrau or Sherkasky or Cortot is because there are some minor or major inaccurancies at times and the style of playing is different to other pianists.However most people do not realize that if someone could listen to Arrau playing a piece 10 different times there would be 10 different interpretations. I would advice you to listen to the Great pianists of 20 century collection,and to his philips double cd that plays Liszt (on a double cd along with Nikitta Magalof). Arrau's Liszt etudes maybe a dissapointment to those that are used to the extreme (and nearly impossible) tempos of Sviatoslav Richter playing Feux Follets for example but i think some of these performances are golden and offer us a great opportunity to listen to a pianist from forgotten area of piano playing. About Askhenazy i think his recordings of Rachmaninov Preludes (and his second sonata) are amongst the greatest recordings.However there are plenty other recordings that i do not like.Some of his Scriabin recordings just do not sound right to me (i have almost all the recordings of Vladimir Sofroninzky and if we compare the 2 i think Askenazy's recordings are so poor).However his chopin etude recordings are excellent. Best regards

If i wanna hear different performances, I would just do so by listening to different (great) pianists. . I don't agree with you on this. Horowitz played a lot of wrong notes, but I like him very much. Often it is the opposite that's true: a unique style will attract more attention, provided that the style make sense and is not a forced one. Ivo Pogorelich is very unique in his Chopin sonata, but I have no problem loving it.

WHen i was younger I called him Claudio Arret, because whenever he wanted to make a point, he would simply slow down. I too found his interpretations plodding and distinctly lacking in any musical attractiveness. Later on I heard some old recordings that were amazing; he played a lot better when he was young! Then I heard him live in Montreal when he was very old, 4 Beethoven sonatas. He played Waldstein very slowly, but it was beautiful, very musical and heartfelt. The whole evening was really lovely. So I finally saw that he was a good musician and a good pianist. I still don't agree with his way, but many roads lead to Rome... And look at the Mendelssohn Rondo Cappricioso in my film, it really is amazing!

WHen i was younger I called him Claudio Arret, because whenever he wanted to make a point, he would simply slow down. I too found his interpretations plodding and distinctly lacking in any musical attractiveness. Later on I heard some old recordings that were amazing; he played a lot better when he was young! Then I heard him live in Montreal when he was very old, 4 Beethoven sonatas. He played Waldstein very slowly, but it was beautiful, very musical and heartfelt. The whole evening was really lovely. So I finally saw that he was a good musician and a good pianist. I still don't agree with his way, but many roads lead to Rome... And look at the Mendelssohn Rondo Cappricioso in my film, it really is amazing! Hi, I agree. I heard him live in the Liszt B minor Sonata and some Debussy and some Beethoven when he was eighty-something. But ... I have the video in which he plays the Schumann Concerto. He is amazing at that age. I think the video also has Schumann's Carnival. I had heard about trills with the whole arm! He does this in the trill at the end of the Cadenza. Not that is the hightlight of the performance: of course not but it is a curiosity in itself. The Mendelssohn "Rondo Capriccioso" is also outstanding. Regards, Miguel

I feel a statement like the above being quite unfair to Arrau, whose discography spans more than half century (from the '30s all the way up to 1991, just months before his death). You might happen to have come across moments in his interpretation of this vast repertoire that didn't speak to you, but, to call his technique "dirty" and "rough", and his playing lacking of "passion and power", is quite a great disrespect to such a great musician. To start of, you might like to check out his Liszt. I have not heard of any other pianists who combined technical brilliance and poetry so organically in Liszt's works the way he did. Both brilliant technique and musicianship are in great display here, and gosh there is no lack of passion nor power in his playing of these works. Then comes his Beethoven. I really felt that Arrau's playing brought Beethoven's soul back to life. I was totally swept by his gradation of tone, his phrasing, and his ability to bring out the architecture of the pieces. And what an ability to bring out the polyphonic texture of this music! Just listen to any chordal passage in the Beethoven sonatas, say, the Waldstein, or the Appassionata, or Les Adieux. Where others treat the chords as blobs, one succeeding another, Arrau played them out as multiple layers of sound with plenty of air between one another. And I've compared quite a few, among them, Schabel, Moravec, Kempff, Brendel, Angela Hewitt, Richter, Serkin, Gilels, also Horowitz. Schabel is another pianist that play this music with much orchestration. IMHO, Horowitz' interpretation of Beethoven sounds dry and pale against Arrau's. P.S. There're plenty of stormy moments in the fore-mentioned sonatas. His Debussy is bold, with striking colors, unlike Gieseking's. Here, personal tastes may differ. His Chopin is also a mixed bag. Some waltz, nocturnes and ballades are heart-wrenchingly beautiful, while others can be downright boring. For instance, his Waltz No. 10 op. 69 no. 2 suffered from the "stop and go" problem that Alan mentioned (I much prefer Lipatti's). But these are really a small percentage of the overall vast repertoire that he mastered. To close off, I just feel that we need to show more restraint when criticizing others' work. It would be much more constructive to mention the specific work that we don't like from a musician, rather than simply throwing out a blanket statement like this. I believe that we're all on this forum because music is a calling for us, and, precisely because of that, then, we should be the ones that know exactly how much dedication it takes for an artist to strive for recognition, and, in Arrau's case, he really does deserve all of the recognitions. Even Placido Domingo, a great tenor and a great musician of our time, showed a lot of respect for Arrau. Domingo actually went up stage and sang "Happy Birthday" to Arrau at the end of Arrau's 80th Birthday Recital. (you should be able to find a YouTube of this occasion through google). Regards, Twinkle (twinkle little star).

I absolutely agree with you!!! Thank you for joining our forum and i hope i will see you around!

Then I heard him live in Montreal when he was very old, 4 Beethoven sonatas. He played Waldstein very slowly, but it was beautiful, very musical and heartfelt. The whole evening was really lovely. So I finally saw that he was a good musician and a good pianist. I still don't agree with his way, but many roads lead to Rome... Alan, I think we attended the same concert I also was sort of disappointed with his Beethoven, although I could clearly hear a very mature artist playing. His sound was trully beautiful, round, never harsh. But again, Beethoven can suffer from being treated with too much softness

When I didn't like Arrau's playing it was certainly not because of any dirt I heard, but a certain monotony of phrasing. To put Cortot and Arrau on the same level of comparison is something I can't agree with. Cortot played much more dirty and much more beautifully. This is especially wonderfully shown in the Master Class CD's which are an absolute treasure. He plays the Chopin B minor sonata so much more beautifully when he is teaching and talking about it than in his studio recording! There's a spontaneity, lyricism, sensitivity to beauty of tone, emotion and expression that is simply ethereal. And of course Horowitz played dirty but was unbelievable. Richter played clean but there is some Mozart recorded that is so un-phrased it is hard to believe he would release it... I heard Cherkassky only once, in Montreal when he was very old, playing the Rachmaninoff 3rd. I was a little bit disappointed but probably way back then I didn't understand the work... But these discussions about pianistic likes and dislikes must always be read with a grain of salt - different people simply have a different musical aesthetic. My colleague Ratimir Martinovich recorded a Goldberg Variations that to me is to die for, it is really second to none and reveals a depth of emotion, colour, polyphonic complexity and variety of expression that I haven't found in other recordings - compared to this one, they are all flat and pale. But most of the people I play this recording to think it is "overdone," they don't like it... Why don't you see for yourselves, here is the link: I spend my life exhorting myself and my students to greater colour, greater power, greater variety, greater intensity of expression, but many people don't even want it! My piano tuner in Montreal, Gilles Losier, told me of one great German pianist (who shall remain anonymous) that came to play at Place des Arts, tried the wonderful new New York Steinway they had just acquired, and said it had TOO MUCH DYNAMIC RANGE!!! What sort of aesthetic could cause such a reaction??? AFF