The Jolly Times
"Because my playing is very clear when I make a mistake, you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare."
Horowitz used round fingers as the essence of his piano finger technique
Horowitz used a flat finger technique mostly when playing chords, octaves, and black keys.
"To be able to produce many varieties of sound, and that is what I try to do. I think each pianist must ultimately carve his own way, technically and stylistically."
"For me, the intellect is always the guide but not the goal of the performance. Too much intellect can become scholastic. Too much heart can become schmaltz. Too much technique, and you become a mechanic."
"If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake."
"I don’t like the Russian approach to music, to art, to anything. I lost all my family there. I never want to go back, and I never will."
On his arrival in New York in 1928, Horowitz was announced: ”The Tornado of the Steppes, a superhuman combination of Rosenthal, Paderewski, Busoni, Rachmaninov, and Hofmann.”
"I tried playing for the public, and I selected music that I thought would be pleasing to them. Times are different now. Today, I play the music I want, and I just try to do my best."
"When I was a teenager, my life was sports. I dearly loved playing baseball, and I was a darn good hitter."
"As Chopin and Mozart said, the left hand is your conductor; the right hand is the solo. Then there is rubato. Rubato, you know, is robbing the time, making it faster here and slower there."
At The Film Studios
"You know, I’m at heart a composer, so I do it naturally. Some of my improvisations are tremendous, some are very poor."
To Barenboim: "You are a pianist. A true pianist, a real pianist, must play the piano. He must not divide himself."
"Chopin would have changed a lot of things if he had a Steinway. Of that, I’m sure, oh yes! You can’t play them well if you follow Chopin’s metronome markings. They are too fast. They are all terrible."
"My father-in-law was the law. He was more difficult than me."
”Already, I knew he was the best. I fell in love with Volodya’s pedaling.”
”If Rachmaninoff is not a good composer, isn’t he at least the greatest pianist today?” The Maestro replied vehemently, ”He? Never in the world! It’s Volodya who is the greatest because what he can do is superhuman!”
"All three should be equally developed. Without common sense, you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine."
"I was a terrible student. For me, to take a book home was a trial."
"What they ask of us to do should be forbidden. The public knows nothing of what is required, knows nothing of the hell of work required."
"The thing is to become a master and, in your old age, to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing."
"I’m only a tree, a big one or little one, I don’t know.” What about Liszt? ”Liszt is so high that we can’t even see the top. It’ll still take years for us to fully understand his importance in music.”
"His music is supersensuous, super romantic, and super mysterious. Everything is super; it is all a little overboard. Anyway, my parents were pleased that I played for him."
"The more you know, the more difficult it gets. So every piece is difficult."
"That's what the interpreter must find out. He may sit down and play one passage one way and then perhaps exaggerate the next, but, in any event, he must do something with the music. The worst thing is not to do anything."
"Scriabin slept with Chopin under his pillow, and I slept with Wagner under mine. I had all of 'Gotterdammerung' in my fingers."
"The most important thing is to make a percussive instrument a singing instrument. Teachers should stress this aspect in their instruction, but it seems that very few of them actually do."
"I am never afraid to dare. The music is behind those dots."
”Oh, sure, many times. These are times of despair. But the piano always brings me back. It calls me.”
"The piano is the easiest instrument to play at the beginning and the hardest to master in the end."
The life of Arthur Rubinstein
The perfection of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli