Audition: Brahms - Piano Concerto No 1, Horowitz/NYPSO/Toscanini

Toscanini and his son in law in tandem reveal new ways to play Brahms’ masterpiece

 Live performance from 78s, March 1953

You’ll need to put that relationship to one side. It’s generally surface noise and it isn’t on all of the sides. That being said it’s a fascinating meeting of two formidable musicians of their period at the top of their powers in Brahms’ most dramatic concerto so it’s too good to miss.

For the majority of the reading Toscanini sticks to Horowitz like glue and it works like a charm. Horowitz is the star turn and he shows huge variety of techniques which redefine the model we know today.

The first movement is is suitably powerful and terse. It’s bold and precise and make the music sound like the beginning of a Beethoven symphony. But every line is held and Toscanini matches the ebb and flow of the younger colleagues thinking.

The Adagio is beautifully musical and his touch here is sublime. There are points where it hardly sounds like Brahms at all and more like Chopin to its benefit. the movement is lifted from the role of interlude to something much more beautiful and substantial. The pedal notes are telling.

The final movement is glorious if by that point many listeners aren’t jaded by the state of the recording. It is dramatic, fresh and breathless. 

Overall this is a fascinating document of how a pianist of a very different tradition to most of those who were subsequently to record it and a conductor who was completely at his service.

The Orchestra is fine and we can hear quite a lot of the inner detail which is remarkable for the source and the technology of the period. Horowitz went on to record the Concerto again a year later and that was in studio circumstances.

We don’t, outside of the concerti, associate Horowitz with Brahms, sniglets aside, there’s not much on record. But he brings a breath of fresh air, as a 32yo, beyond the path others were taking.