Horowitz Live Recitals: volume 2 just released by Pristine

[jserraglio]

Andrew Rose has begun releasing the VH at Carnegie Hall Yale Collection. There are 11 recitals from 1945-50, with material not in the live Carnegie Recitals Sony set. The first volume from 1948 is pictured below. The rest, hopefully, will follow. I have heard a few of the raw captures before Rose mastered them, and even in that state they sounded fine.

https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2 ... T1fAxB4FUw

This recording is the first of a collection of recordings made for Vladimir Horowitz's private use of concerts given in New York's Carnegie Hall. The recordings were captured on 78rpm acetate discs and survive in various states of disrepair in a collection held at Yale University.

I have worked from high quality transfers which had had side joins made (with various degrees of success) but no further processing or cleaning up. In the present recording the very opening arpeggiated chord comes in very slightly late as a solid rather than broken chord; otherwise everything is present.

By trimming applause I've been able to fit the main body of the concert onto a single CD; encores are available in all download versions, including the free MP3s which accompany this CD, and may be incorporated into a separate CD release in due course.

The tonal quality of the piano here is exceptional. I had to deal with some surface noise and swish, but overall this is a splendid release, only a small part of which has been previously issued.

--Andrew Rose

HAYDN Piano Sonata No. 62 in E flat major, Hob. XVI:52
1. 1st mvt. - Allegro moderato (5:41)
2. 2nd mvt. - Adagio (4:28)
3. 3rd mvt. - Presto (3:55)

4. SCHUBERT Impromptu in G flat major, Op. 90 No. 3, D899 (6:47)

5. SCRIABIN Vers la flamme, Op. 72 (5:11)
6. SCRIABIN Poème in F-sharp major, Op.32 No.1 (3:09)
7. SCRIABIN Etude in F-sharp major, Op.42 No.4 (2:23)
8. SCRIABIN Etude in D-sharp minor, Op.8 No.12 (2:12)

KABALEVSKY Piano Sonata No. 3 in F major, Op. 49
9. 1st mvt. - Allegro con moto (5:41)
10. 2nd mvt. - Andante cantabile (4:37)
11. 3rd mvt. - Allegro giocoso (4:50)

12. CHOPIN Fantasie in F minor, Op.49 (12:29)
13. CHOPIN Nocturne in E minor, Op.72 No.1 (4:33)
14. CHOPIN Impromptu No.1 in A-flat major, Op.29 (3:36)
15. CHOPIN Nocturne in F-sharp major, Op.15 No.2 (3:38)
16. CHOPIN Polonaise in A-flat major, Op.53 (6:42)

Encores - Included in downloads only (NB. CD includes MP3 download of these items)

17. SCARLATTI Sonata in E major, K.380 (L.23)
18. MOSZKOWSKI Etude in A major, Op.72 No.6
19. SCHUMANN Träumerei, Op.15 No.7
20. LISZT-HOROWITZ Mendelssohn Wedding March Variations

Vladimir Horowitz piano

XR remastering by Andrew Rose
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Vladimir Horowitz
Recorded 2 February 1948
Carnegie Hall, New York City

[jserraglio]

Here are the dates of the 11 privately recorded, previously unreleased Carnegie Hall recitals in the Yale archive.

1945.3.28
1946.3.4
1946.4.6
1946.4.24
1947.2.3
1947.3.28
1947.4.28
1948.2.2 : the one just issued by Pristine
1948.4.2
1949.3.21
1950.1.23

[jserraglio]

Here is Schubert's Impromptu Op.90 No.3, the second work in the Feb. 4, 1948 recital, taken from raw captures. Note that this recital took place two days after the one released by Pristine which also included this work.

The sound here is very clear and natural. The performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition from the same recital is extraordinary. Hopefully Pristine will release that one too.

[maestrob]

This is indeed exciting news! As a Horowitz collector, I think I'll wait until the complete set is issued, but thanks for alerting us to its availability. Something to look forward to.

[jserraglio]

This is indeed exciting news! As a Horowitz collector, I think I'll wait until the complete set is issued, but thanks for alerting us to its availability. Something to look forward to.

Those that have compared this batch of private recordings to Sony's commercial live Carnegie Hall series (there is no significant duplication that I am aware of; these will be mostly brand new issues not reissues) claim that these recordings have a natural hall and piano sound, whereas the Sonys sound unpleasantly dry. I haven't heard the Sonys but I listened to two complete recitals (Feb. 2 & 4, 1948) this morning and was amazed at how good the piano sounded.

[maestrob]

Carnegie Hall's own recordings of its concerts have that dry feeling to them, as I found when I conducted there. I got much better results by taking my singers into various studios, including (empty) Town Hall. My guess is that these new releases you're talking about have added a subtle amount of reverb. Nothing wrong with that in my book.

Carnegie's policy at the time was that the performer could record the concert for a small fee, but no copies could be distributed to the performers. The union could be very strict about this. During my final concert there, a singer who had done very well made a comment about paying me for a copy of the tape within earshot of Carnegie's recording engineer. At the end of the concert, he handed me three tapes instead of the usual four, claiming that he had forgotten to turn up the volume for the first tape which, alas, contained the aria of the singer in question.

The fee for public release of a concert recording at the time was $15,000, and that was for the recital hall.

BTW: I do have the Horowitz Carnegie Hall CD set, and he performed Pictures at an Exhibition that year. Was that piece on the concert you heard? Just curious.

[jserraglio]

The Pictures I heard was performed as the highlight of the Feb 4, 1948 recital. The dynamic range surprised me. Admittedly, I have not heard the Sony CH 41-CD release. As I understand it, that huge Sony box includes 3 complete recitals from 1949-50 (Discs 2-7) and a compilation of recitals given between 1945-50 (Discs 38-41) labeled as being from Horowitz's Private Collection.

This new archive contains mostly unreleased performances from 11 more recitals recorded between 1945-50 as part of that Horowitz Private Collection. Not a compilation, it appears to contain all 11 recitals complete, but I haven't had a chance to listen to all of them yet.

All are from 78 rpm acetates. I read that Horowitz hired his own engineer to record these recitals for his own private use so somehow he was able to sidestep the House's rules or get them waived in his case. The disks wound up at Yale and only over the summer got released into the blogosphere where I got them in raw form.

The uploader of this trove then apparently made the entire archive available to Andrew Rose of Pristine Classical who now intends to remaster and release them piecemeal, assuming they sell enough copies to make the enterprise worth his while.

That's about all I know at this point. I've listened to the two recitals from Feb 1948 in their entirety. Both sound and performance were first class.

[Lance]

Anything by Horowitz is, of course, of great interest to me. Horowitz still sells, thankfully ... his pianist style was certainly very unique even among duplicated performances. Perhaps this will be a long, ongoing project for Mr. Rose, and I hope he succeeds in his venture.

[jserraglio]

Anything by Horowitz is, of course, of great interest to me. Horowitz still sells, thankfully ... his pianist style was certainly very unique even among duplicated performances. Perhaps this will be a long, ongoing project for Mr. Rose, and I hope he succeeds in his venture.

A second volume has just appeared. I have heard the 4 Feb 1948 Carnegie Hall Pictures as a raw capture from the same source that Andrew Rose used (they were uploaded to a forum and later sent on to Mr Rose) and it is an excellent performance.

https://www.pristineclassical.com/products/pasc513

Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition

Recorded 15 May, 1947
Town Hall(?), New York City
Previously unreleased take

The Horowitz recording of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was recorded on 15 May 1947. For reasons unknown the recording was remade during three sessions at the end of 1947 and the present recording never used. It's a great pity as this is an excellent performance than more than deserves to be heard. It is possible that technical issues were cause for its rejection - pitch instability and flutter coupled with some pre- and post-echo were apparent on the source material, problems that have largely been fixed here, allowing us to hear this remarkable recording for the very first time in fine sound.

Andrew Rose