Golden Age of the Piano

The disc also comes with a tacked-on bonus: Claudio Arrau performing one of his specialties, the Beethoven G Major Concerto, with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music. While I am a big admirer of Arrau, this performance was near the end of his life and he was not in top form. Muti makes the fine Philly Orch sound like an anonymous house band, for what's what they mostly were in his hands. The performance is enjoyable, but not essential.

The documentary's narrator, David Dubal, is stiff and wooden (and dig that jacket!). He's not the best host, and tends to read every line as though it were portentous and profound, but at the same time, he's no worse than the grating narrator on the A of P. The structure of the documentary is odd: after starting with the deaths of Horowitz, Arrau and Serkin, stating that they were the end of the great Romantic era of piano playing, we flash backwards to the beginning. We then work back to the three pianists who began our story, so it seems that we're wrapping up after them. But no, the filmmaker then inexplicably tacks on about five minutes of black and white footage of Van Cliburn, never even mentioned till then, performing his signature piece, the Tchaikovsky Concerto. *Then* the documentary ends!

... Even the Paderewski, though from the same concert, is of different works. The Hofmann is the same only because this is the only footage extant of the man. Horowitz is seen performing the same Scriabin Etude from the same concert (his famous televised Carnegie Hall recital of 1968) in both, when there is plenty of Horowitz footage out there. One minor complaint is no dates for any of the footage is given in either the documentary or the booklet.

This is definitely worth owning, especially when there isn't really another way to see most of this footage. My usual criticism applies--it could have been longer and featured lengthier excerpts from the musicians and less pompous yacking from the dour Dubal. (Don't *tell* me about a pianist's singing pianissimo or thunderous octaves, let me HEAR them.) But it isn't like this subject area has lots of competition out there on DVD, so grab this.

We have a very short clip of Paderewski and Serkin which is too short to be impressing. The same for Grainger too. For a fan of either of them, he sure doesn't want to miss it. ( For Rubinstein, or Horowitz, or even Serkin we have much better DVDs commercially now available.)

Moreover, we have long narrations on things like the development of the piano and marginally relevant background of the names of pianists, covering the history of recording industry. Often the voice of narrator goes aheads and keeps along with the piano making the listening time of the latter so little. What is most objectionable is the the narrator himself. For BBC productions, we see a lot of new faces and most of them are either prominent musicians themselves or those directly related to the musicians in question. Here we always have the same voice with an accent plus a long face, and his comments are very biased and misleading.

But, we have more than adequate compensation in Arrau playing first a sonata and then Beethoven's No. 4 Concerto. Here his "paws" are extrememly well depicted. In contrast, we have very rigid and curved fingers of Landowska.