A Critique of Modern Pianists

The Golden Age of the piano is held by many to have passed along with Rachmaninoff, Hofmann, &c. The twentieth century for the most part belonged to Horowitz, Rubinstein, Richter, and to a lesser extent Glenn Gould, Gilels, Perlemuter, and a few others. It is generally held that the old masters had a distinctive style that one could recognize from a single hearing, whereas today's performers all sound alike. Let's review a few much-overrated modern performers:
 

1. Recent winners of the International Chopin competition: Yundi Li (2000) is perhaps the best of the lot. His technique is very good, and his music is artistically intelligent, though he wouldn't last two minutes in the shadow of any of the great twentieth- or nineteenth-century pianists. Rafał Blechacz (2005) is simply awful (when one hears his music, one gets the urge to shout, "Blechacz!"), and it's a darned good thing that he realized this, for he doesn't seem to appear in public quite so often as when the headiness of his inexplicable triumph at the Chopin competition made him believe that it was somehow okay for him to be heard in public. Yulianna Avdeeva (2010) is perhaps the least talented winner of the Competition ever. It makes you wonder whether the jury is not biased. (And whether Ivo Pogorelich <1980> ought to have been disqualified in the 8th round, and caused Martha Argerich, a member of the jury, to resign in protest.)

2. Arcadi Volodos: Exactly as everyone says, he tries too hard to imitate Horowitz, though he is quick to contemn the Master as a performer when asked about it. He hasn't any of Horowitz's musical genius or even love of music (which bordered on obsession). His repertoire is small and unadventurous, which makes it difficult to think of him other than as a minor performer, sort of a blotch on the pages of musical history. His transcriptions clearly aim to rival Horowitz's, but they are bizarre, uninspired, and bombastic. His virtuosic transcriptions of Mozart's Turkish March or Mendelssohn's Wedding March, for instance, have none of  the genius or musicality of Horowitz's trancriptions. His technique is sound, so that if he had but a little more musicality, and if Horowitz had never existed before him, he might be a good musician today.
 

3. Boris Berezovsky: He does not deserve to be called a pianist. In fact, it ought to be made illegal for him to come within ten feet of a piano. I don't know if it's just the instrument he chooses, but the piano in every single performance by him that I have heard has had a disagreeable metallic tone. And his technique is just annoying. He is able to play difficult works, but that isn't saying much at all if he is incapable of producing a good tone. One gets the impression that he strikes the keys half-heartedly, and lifts his hands before the note has had time to be fully produced. I have never heard a less intelligent or a more unmusical pianist. 

4. Evgeny Kissin: He's only marginally more tolerable than Berezovsky. His playing makes every single composition he undertakes sound like something massive, fragmented, and unmanageable, as if he were trying to walk a herd of dinosaurs on leashes. That said, his scales in Chopin's 24th Prelude, Op. 28 are remarkably even. At any rate, he is of no consequence.

5. Hélène Grimaud: She comes across as a terribly arrogant and self-important performer, though she hasn't the musicality to justify it. Nor the technique, as her terrible performance of Liszt's Piano Sonata (admittedly a terrible composition*) proved. Her rendition of the Chopin Ballade in G Minor, which she admittedly made in her youth (it would be rare to see her perform something so popular, I would imagine, today), was mechanical and uninspired.

Martha Argerich, Pollini, Zimerman, who were admittedly quite prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century, still retain a glimmer of that Golden Age that we speak of so reverently. It's a pity Argerich refuses to give solo performances under the lame excuse that they make her feel lonely on stage. Actually, after listening to her reckless and rushed Carnegie Hall performance of 2000, it's probably just as well. 

Stanislav Bunin is a much underrated pianist. His performances at the 1985 Chopin Competition were breathtakingly musical, distinctive, and intelligent. It's little wonder, since he is the grandson of the late Heinrich Neuhaus, teacher to many of the finest pianists of the twentieth century, including Richter and Gilels. 

Marc-André Hamelin is actually a fantastic pianist. He has given more than a few performances that have lacked in sensitivity (or whatever), and I don't think I could ever like his Chopin (his first and third Ballades were almost painful to listen to, whereas the fourth was probably merely all right), and Alkan is not a composer I much admire. (Alkan's music is childish in its simplicity in spite of the almost insuperable technical difficulties it presents, and is plain boring.) Hamelin's performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 seemed to miss the mark. It was inferior in terms of control and excitement to Rachmaninoff's and Hofmann's, and his cadenza was long and senseless in the context of the piece. His performance of Schlözer's Etude in A-Flat was inferior to Eileen Joyce's, or even Stephen Hough's, and he seems guilty of over-pedaling. But all that said, there are tons of compositions of which Hamelin has given performances that are beyond amazing and breathtaking. For instance, I could never listen to anyone else's rendition of Liszt's Rémeniscences de Don Juan, and in his recording of Godowsky's Passacaglia he may well be the composer himself (there have probably been fewer than ten other performers who have undertaken this fearsome work). His Bach-Busoni Chaconne is also an amazing feat of musicality married to fabulous virtuosity. His performance of the now rarely performed fourth concerto of Anton Rubinstein matches that of Hofmann, a Rubinstein pupil. Aside from all that, he seems to embody many of the qualities of the Golden Age, as Kenneth Hamilton points out in his book After the Golden Age, in that he is a composer as well as a pianist, is reviving many rarely performed or forgotten composers and works, and endeavors actively to free classical music from the stultifying cult it has been reduced to, and thereby to convince the general populace that it isn't as inaccessible as they had been led to believe (possibly an influence of the New World). Good chap, this Hamelin. 

Nikolai Lugansky is another modern pianist whose music I like very much. His controlled virtuosity is very effective in Rachmaninoff and Liszt, and his renditions of the Chopin Études are among the very best. It is to pianists like these that we must turn in the present day.