Godowsky Impressions
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Leopold Godowsky
Label: Etcetera
Magazine Review Date: 8/1989
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 42
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: KTC1067
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
(12) Impressions |
Leopold Godowsky, Composer
Cord Garben, Piano Gottfried Schneider, Violin Leopold Godowsky, Composer |
Author: Michael Oliver
Leopold Godowsky was perhaps the most consummately virtuoso pianist who has ever lived, but his compositions for his own instrument were intended not as vehicles for his own technique but as teaching material for a future generation of pianists to whom his control over the keyboard would be commonplace. That generation has not arrived, but his pieces have a undoubted fascination, especially for pianists, as idealistic essays on what the piano could do if even post-Lisztian technique were transcended. Their musical quality is almost irrelevant: their subject matter is the untapped potential of the instrument, the technique of making the impossible possible. When his musical style is separated from his pianism, however, it does become permissible to discuss quality and he virtually invited us to do so by transcribing two movements of his Piano Sonata and ten of his 24 Walzermasken as the Impressions for violin and piano.
The style is very Viennese, often reminiscent of Fritz Kreisler (to whom the transcriptions are dedicated), sometimes of the coffee-house (the teashop, even) or the dance-floor (nearly all are in waltz rhythm). Their individuality, such as it is, lies in a rather wayward chromaticism, used for nostalgic or elegiac effect (most of the pieces are slow). The writer of the accompanying note suggests that they are elegies for vanished Vienna (the transcriptions were made in 1916, though the piano originals date from four or five years earlier) and their predominant vein is indeed one of sentimental regret. Their chief weakness is the anonymity of their melodic language, compounded by Godowsky's way of constructing his tunes from short phrases that are rhythmically identical or nearly so. Some of them have a faded charm, and as unexpectedly soft-centred encorepieces after a demanding recital would come as a pleasant surprise, but their mawkish bonelessness soon palls when a dozen of them are laid end to end.
Schneider plays them with the slightly astringent lusciousness (rather reminiscent of Kreisler, actually) that they seem to demand, and he is wellserved both by his pianist (the keyboard parts are often surprisingly reticent) and the unassertively clean recordine.'
The style is very Viennese, often reminiscent of Fritz Kreisler (to whom the transcriptions are dedicated), sometimes of the coffee-house (the teashop, even) or the dance-floor (nearly all are in waltz rhythm). Their individuality, such as it is, lies in a rather wayward chromaticism, used for nostalgic or elegiac effect (most of the pieces are slow). The writer of the accompanying note suggests that they are elegies for vanished Vienna (the transcriptions were made in 1916, though the piano originals date from four or five years earlier) and their predominant vein is indeed one of sentimental regret. Their chief weakness is the anonymity of their melodic language, compounded by Godowsky's way of constructing his tunes from short phrases that are rhythmically identical or nearly so. Some of them have a faded charm, and as unexpectedly soft-centred encorepieces after a demanding recital would come as a pleasant surprise, but their mawkish bonelessness soon palls when a dozen of them are laid end to end.
Schneider plays them with the slightly astringent lusciousness (rather reminiscent of Kreisler, actually) that they seem to demand, and he is wellserved both by his pianist (the keyboard parts are often surprisingly reticent) and the unassertively clean recordine.'
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