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The Music of Vladimir Horowitz

I don't feel like writing out a lengthy treatise on the subject at this time, partly because I'm tired and partly because I feel VH's music speaks for itself. I just feel the need to make a few observations about this most consummate of musicians. The first is that his phrasing is very organic. Sure, sometimes it is a little exaggerated and weird, but for the vast majority of pieces VH's phrasing is more organic than that of almost any other pianist who comes to mind. By that I mean that the listener is scarcely aware that the music is being shaped by human fingers: It sounds so much as if rose out of the ocean of abstract music of its own accord and took on the most natural, the most perfect form. For other pianists, the millisecond delays that result from their overthinking the phrasing of a particular passage stand out like holes in a tapestry; and for still other pianists, their hesitation in playing a note in a certain way, with certain dynamics, stands out, even if the millisecond delays are not present. VH's innate musical sense was truly remarkable, even if his technique may not have been the greatest in history or even particularly reliable in his later years. His execution of ornaments bears testimony to this fact. No one can quite phrase ornaments, acciaccaturas, appoggiaturas in quite the way VH could. Just listen to his Chopin Mazurkas. They take the breath away immediately, because you know that there is no one on this planet who can play them with the same consummate understanding of their form or their structure as VH. There is, after all, a reason he was so legendary.

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