Today is Record Store Day, which reminds me of the great joy that I used to have going around record stores back when I first learned of historical piano recordings. I had a list of names from Harold C Schonberg’s book The Great Pianists and soon learned to recognize the covers of labels that tended to feature the kinds of recordings I was looking for.
I still remember how, a year or two into my exploration, I walked into the Cheap Thrills record store in Montreal (the records were in fact very cheap) and hit the jackpot. It seemed like someone with an amazing collection had died, because there was a massive collection of exactly what I was looking for: the five volumes of The Complete Rachmaninoff on RCA Victor and a whole bunch of International Piano Archives records, all at $3 a piece. I wasn’t rolling around in money and there were tons of records that I wanted, a couple of hundred dollars’ worth, so I triaged what I would buy immediately and put the rest on hold (which they would do for a week). Among the ones that I picked up that first day was Josef Hofmann’s Casimir Hall Recital, which took place April 7, 1938 (80 years ago just a couple of weeks back).
I had read lots about Hofmann in Schonberg’s book but he wasn’t the only one from whom I had heard about him. My high school physics teacher Mr. Greiner was a terrible physics teacher but I had found out that he was a true expert and connoisseur of historical piano recordings, so when he gave the class a problem to solve, I would go to the front of the room and he would tell me about which recordings I should listen to and why – and Hofmann’s Waldstein was one of the recordings he stated was utterly otherworldly and a must-hear. (Rumours are that Mr. Greiner’s lack of physics know-how led to his demise when he learned the hard way that he and a bus could not occupy the same physical space at the same time but I haven’t heard confirmation of this… I hope that’s not the case.)
I still remember the experience of sitting in my parents’ living room, with Hofmann’s face on the cover staring at me while I listened to a performance that I simply couldn’t have imagined existed – it was as though I had been dosed with a mind-altering substance, as I simply couldn’t comprehend this totally other kind of pianism that I was hearing. I wasn’t enamoured with all of it, but I knew that there was more to piano playing than I had been exposed to and I was determined to listen and learn as much as I could.
That stunning Waldstein is now available on Marston Records’ incredible series devoted to Hofmann’s legacy and it is a performance that is most certainly not for the faint of heart: boldly individual, imaginative, creative, Romantic, heartfelt, passionate (to put it mildly), with dramatic accents and outbursts, soaring lines, and transparent textures. Hofmann embodied what Andor Foldes said, that one cannot truly give a performance that is separate from the performer, so ‘we can never hear only Beethoven: we listen to Beethoven-Schnabel, or Beethoven-Toscanini, or Beethoven-Heifetz.’ Well, this Beethoven-Hofmann is an experience itself, a journey and exploration into an entirely different realm of music-making.
Happy Record Day. Please go support the shops that are still around selling records – without them, our lives would be much less rich.
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