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Horowitz Plays Rach 3 (1950)

Today I discovered a recording by Horowitz of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 from 1950, peerless in how awful it is. It sounds like the piano and orchestral parts were recorded separately and then put together by an amateur sound engineer who had to run to catch a bus right afterwards. At one point in the first movement the conductor had to bring the orchestra to a grinding halt for a second to resync with the piano. I imagine Horowitz would have been none too pleased at the end of the performance, though the fact that it had taken place at so unglamorous a venue as the Hollywood Bowl would have given him a little consolation. The conductor, Koussevitzky, died the very next year - possibly as a direct result of this performance as well as the thought of having the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra listed on his concertography. The vulgar ritardando at the very end of the piece was Koussevitzky’s way of saying “It is finished,” in the manner of Jesus in the Gospel of John during the Crucifixion. The one ray of sunlight shining through this train wreck of a performance is the fact that the first movement cadenza is absolutely brilliant - better than in the 1951 and more accurate than in the 1930, 1941, and 1943 recordings.

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