Blind Comparison: Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit

[MishaK]

Not sure where the net links are here but the DG Pogorelich remains one of the most transcendental piano recordings of all time, sounding like something from an ideal impressionistic nightmare, finding the essence of the work entirely beyond the limits of the keyboard; dark blood-red in the zone painting as I've never heard.

Also heard him live but time changes things...

Also your comments are now pointless. The whole point of blind comparison is to listen without the prejudice of the PR bombast and other aspects of a performer's "aura", not knowing who it is and just letting yourself be pulled in by a Michael Endres (who?) and kicking Pogo out in round two for failing to produce two movements that live up to the hype ascribed to the third. 

[Sean]

Remind me again how I can listen...?

Also your comments are now pointless. The whole point of blind comparison is to listen without the prejudice of the PR bombast and other aspects of a performer's "aura", not knowing who it is and just letting yourself be pulled in by a Michael Endres (who?) and kicking Pogo out in round two for failing to produce two movements that live up to the hype ascribed to the third. 

[MishaK]

I'm happy to see my fave - Thibaudet - earn the bronze. I've raved about his Gaspard in the past. Too bad his set is so expensive now (outside of an Arkiv burn).

The Thibaudet is available on Arkiv at a discount for $19.99 as a regular Decca issue, not an Arkiv burn:

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=4326

Remind me again how I can listen...?

Brian PM-ed us links. I don't want to repost them here without his authorization, so I'll wait for him to chime in or PM you directly. Not sure if the Ondine and Gibet files are still up. I know he has limited space.

[Brian]

Too bad Hewitt and Rogé weren't included.  Guess I'll have to do my own comparison at home! 

I had a "cutting room floor" list of pianists I wish I could have included, but we would have needed many more judges! For instance, with a bigger pool of listeners, we might have heard from Walter Gieseking, Pascal Rogé, Angela Hewitt, Benjamin Grosvenor, Inon Barnatan, the singularly perverse Tzimon Barto, Paul Crossley, Roger Muraro, Joaquin Achucarro, Naida Cole... the other limit, besides the size of the judging panel, was the availability of these recordings to me. I purchased a number of recordings for this game (inc. Thibaudet, Endres, and Osborne!) but acquiring many more would have been financially challenging.

Given my short attention span

Says the Mahler enthusiast!

Never heard Osborne, Simon or Endres before in any repertoire.

Osborne has, if you like that kind of thing, the best single CD of Kapustin on the market (better than Hamelin's for sure). Abbey Simon is a wonderful performer (and a Texas resident) whose Ravel Vox Box is truly great. Michael Endres is a Schubert/Mozart/Weber guy, so his triumph here kind of surprised me. I listened to his Le tombeau de Couperin and his fugue, very speedy at 2:17, is a total revelation.

Interesting that I liked both not knowing it was the same pianist (or that both were him). I guess I like his approach!

Back at the very start, I was testing links and didn't remember which pianist was which #. Clicking one link, to pianist #1, I knew it was Michelangeli within 15 seconds. He really is inimitable.

There is a difference in relative fame in being on Universal vs. a small label like Oehms or Hyperion.

I wouldn't consider Osborne "famous" - more like a darling of the British press - but it might be a mark of my cloistered listening that I consider, e.g., Yundi Li or Rafal Blechacz to be less "famous" than Angela Hewitt. This might just be because Universal has fallen so far so recently.

Also your comments are now pointless. The whole point of blind comparison is to listen without the prejudice of the PR bombast and other aspects of a performer's "aura", not knowing who it is and just letting yourself be pulled in by a Michael Endres (who?) and kicking Pogo out in round two for failing to produce two movements that live up to the hype ascribed to the third. 

Indeed. Pogo was ranked 2nd out of 20 in "Ondine," and probably could have won in "Scarbo," but the group collectively deemed his "Le gibet" to be, basically, a failure. A shocking banishment, but totally fair.

I'll PM links soon to Sean and Octave so they can compare notes with our judges. I'll also be posting my own thoughts on some of the recordings.

[MishaK]

I had a "cutting room floor" list of pianists I wish I could have included, but we would have needed many more judges! For instance, with a bigger pool of listeners, we might have heard from Walter Gieseking, Pascal Rogé, Angela Hewitt, Benjamin Grosvenor, Inon Barnatan, the singularly perverse Tzimon Barto, Paul Crossley, Roger Muraro, Joaquin Achucarro, Naida Cole... the other limit, besides the size of the judging panel, was the availability of these recordings to me. I purchased a number of recordings for this game (inc. Thibaudet, Endres, and Osborne!) but acquiring many more would have been financially challenging.

Wow! That's dedication! Now, if only one could create lists on Spotify without identifying the performer and share those like any other Spotify list, this could be done much more economically while encompassing virtually every recording available.

BTW, I did a slightly different ranking based on my own scores. Instead of simply adding the scores for each movement, I divided the result by the number of movements. That way I can include performers who were kicked out by the others.  My ranking ends up being:

1. Michelangeli 1960 (9.16)
2. Michelangeli 1959 (8.42)
3. Endres (8.33)
4. Osborne (8.0)
4. Gulda (8.0)
5. Thibaudet (7.65)

The rest didn't come close in points.

[North Star]

I had a "cutting room floor" list of pianists I wish I could have included, but we would have needed many more judges! For instance, with a bigger pool of listeners, we might have heard from Walter Gieseking, Pascal Rogé, Angela Hewitt, Benjamin Grosvenor, Inon Barnatan, the singularly perverse Tzimon Barto, Paul Crossley, Roger Muraro, Joaquin Achucarro, Naida Cole... the other limit, besides the size of the judging panel, was the availability of these recordings to me. I purchased a number of recordings for this game (inc. Thibaudet, Endres, and Osborne!) but acquiring many more would have been financially challenging.

Well, you bought some good ones, at least
How is Barto perverse, though?

[Todd]

Abbey Simon is a wonderful performer (and a Texas resident) whose Ravel Vox Box is truly great.

You are underselling the virtues of the set. 

Michael Endres is a Schubert/Mozart/Weber guy, so his triumph here kind of surprised me. I listened to his Le tombeau de Couperin and his fugue, very speedy at 2:17, is a total revelation.

Don't forget his Bax.  Or Schumann.  Or Gershwin.  I'd like to hear him in Beethoven, of course, but also in concerto repertoire.

[Brian]

Don't forget his Bax.  Or Schumann.  Or Gershwin.  I'd like to hear him in Beethoven, of course, but also in concerto repertoire.

During the "Scarbo" round, I spent literally an entire day listening to Michael Endres. The Schumann was very good, but the Bax was wonderful and the Gershwin was at least as amazing a surprise as the Ravel. In fact for solo piano Gershwin he might rank alongside guys like Earl Wild.

[Brian]

How is Barto perverse, though?

I was going to post Jed Distler's "2 out of 10" review, but ClassicsToday put it behind a paywall as a "CD from Hell," so here's the pretty reliable J. Scott Morrison:

"Throughout his career Tzimon Barto has behaved like the boy in middle school who burps and farts to get attention.... he runs true to form in this all-Ravel disc that contains some of the most peculiar performances I've ever heard. It's not that Barto doesn't have technique. For instance he plays the extremely difficult 'Scarbo' in 'Gaspard de la nuit' as fast as I've ever heard it, although I must admit it goes so fast that the music's effects are blurred. In other passages he simply ignores Ravel's instructions. For instance, 'Le gibet' is marked 'sans expression' yet Barto swoons and swans his way through it. 'Ondine' is w-a-a-y too slow and has rhythmic instability as well."

Naturally, I'm listening to Barto's performance now. I didn't have a problem with the speed of 'Ondine', but the bungled lead-up to the climax, and the brutally ugly, slowed-down climax itself? Yuck.

[Todd]

The Schumann was very good

The thing about his Schumann is that he's at his relative best in Album für die Jugend, something a lot of pianists don't record.  I do wish he'd record Bunte Blatter.

The Gershwin disc is sweet, I do agree.

Oehms punches above its weight, pianistically speaking.

[Brian]

Oehms punches above its weight, pianistically speaking.

Endres' "Traumerei" removed all my adult jadedness about the piece. I just had the chance to review two new Oehms pianist debuts, both doing Ravel (and others); Benjamin Moser was a bit of a mixed bag, with a Gaspard that really missed to me, but Alexander Schimpf's Ravel-Scriabin-Schubert album was a very pleasant little debut. Look forward to more from him.

~~~

Opinions on the performances? I have a few...

#1. Michelangeli 1960. Here's what I wrote on MusicWeb:

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli at his best can be unmistakable: the opening bars of "Ondine," in this 1960 recording of Gaspard de la Nuit, are a great example. Such speed but such accuracy! More or less any pianist who plays this movement in less than six minutes today will fudge or smear or simplify the insanely tricky accompaniment in these first bars. They're a pianist's hell; one can hear virtuosos like Freddy Kempf (BIS) utterly humiliated by them. And yet Michelangeli speeds through them with a precision and casualness that, taken together, explain his legend.
 
It's a great Gaspard all the way. Le Gibet's tolling bells are suitably gloomy and terrifying, and Scarbo, with a teasing pause here, an extra emphasis there, and laser precision throughout, is outstanding too. This is great playing. It's also his fastest Gaspard that I've heard or heard about.

An aside: the first ~10 seconds are why I decided not to use Freddy Kempf's recording.

#3. Thibaudet. Listened to this again last night. I think I was prejudiced against it because the engineering is exactly the opposite of what I like, the sound's just unpleasant to me. But, like the scores here, Thibaudet keeps getting better and better in every movement. Might have found a new favorite Scarbo - or at least a new top-3 Scarbo. Blazingly intense.

#6. Ashkenazy. God I hate his "Le gibet." See my comments on Gulda below.

#8. Sudbin. One more plug for this remarkable, very different approach. "Very different" in a way that made me happy, anyway.

#13. Simon. The more I listen, the more I appreciate and am in awe. It's funny that the slowest Scarbo doesn't feel like it, so intense and dramatic is Simon's playing.

#15. Schuch. Listening again after he was eliminated, I found myself poking little holes in Schuch's approach. For instance, the tiny, affected pauses in the first few minutes of "Ondine," and the truly distracting loudness of parts of "Le gibet." Now I understand why his "Gibet" was voted off the island.

#16. Gulda. Like with Schuch, I listened after elimination, and was most interested in the contrast between Gulda's "Le gibet" and Ashkenazy's. They're both waay too fast (less than 5:00), they both have no attempt to capture stasis or unbearable heat, in poetic terms. But Ashkenazy is a failure here while Gulda's reading is weirdly persuasive. I don't know how to explain it, but it worked better than it should have.

#17. Osborne. After it became clear Osborne was going to win, I listened in full and was really very impressed. The Scarbo lacks a bit of edge, to me, not quite "scary" enough, but I still found myself admiring the sheer pianism. There's a kind of technical perfection which lacks character or personality, which just seems "right" but not interestingly so; this infected some of Osborne's Rachmaninov, but it is definitely not present in this Gaspard. That said, my personal ranking might have had Michelangeli and Simon higher. Maybe. With this around the Thibaudet/Endres level.

#19. Arrau. My thought process while on YouTube: "Arrau Gaspard? There is such a thing? Hey I should include this because it's rare and Arrau is famous. Oh hey, this sounds pretty good. Oh this is really good. Okay downloading."

[MishaK]

I just looked up Endres on the web. http://michaelendres.com/ Dude's a piano professor in .... Christchurch?! After *leaving* a position in Berlin?! WTF?! Does he even perform live these days? I was all hopeful about finding some info on concerts etc. But nothing. 

[MishaK]

#1. Michelangeli 1960. Here's what I wrote on MusicWeb: "this 1960 recording of Gaspard de la Nuit, are a great example. Such speed but such accuracy! More or less any pianist who plays this movement in less than six minutes today will fudge or smear or simplify the insanely tricky accompaniment in these first bars."

I think I've just solved a small mystery. Your "London" 1960 recording is in fact the Prague 1960 recording I've been raving about. Look here: http://www.andrewfwilson.co.uk/abm2.htm (search for Gaspard)
As you will see, the Prague recording is also dated 5/22/60 on various labels, including the M&A incarnation I posted above, and there is no mention of a 1960 London performance of any date in that year. And ABM, superhuman though he was, couldn't have been in two places at the same time. Funnily, I initially mistook Clip No.1 it for the 1959 London recording, which I remembered being inferior.  Silly me! But your comment on it being the fastest ABM Gaspard had me relisten to my discs and I realized that your No.1 is in fact the Prague recording. No wonder it came out on top in my personal listening. It's been my favorite ever since I acquired it.    Since that label shamelssly pirated the EMI Ravel concerto with Gracis, it's no surprise they screwed up (perhaps intentionally) the location of that performance. In any case, the sound on the M&A version is considerably better.

Oehms punches above its weight, pianistically speaking.

Orchestrally too, for the stupendous Skrowaczewski Bruckner cycle alone.

[Brian]

Since that label shamelssly pirated the EMI Ravel concerto with Gracis, it's no surprise they screwed up (perhaps intentionally) the location of that performance.

Wow. Thank you very much for solving this mystery. Praga's in the middle of a series of pirated old recordings - shameful for a label of such repute! - and I've been bamboozled by several of the discs because their documentation is godawful.

The worst was a Richter CD for which I had to submit this review (excerpted):

rec. live 10 June 1956 (unknown tracks), 10-11 June 1962 (unknown tracks), 24 September 1972 (D899, D960), unknown locations

The documentation lists no recording locations and specifies a date for only the B flat sonata, giving two other dates but not saying what they're for. Richter's online discography says the Impromptu was recorded on the same day, which is confusing, because if true this means Praga lists two dates six years apart for the sonata in A.

Thanks again for unearthing this (knowing? mistaken?) deceit. I'll edit the results post and let the MusicWeb editors know to change my review, too.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

The Thibaudet is available on Arkiv at a discount for $19.99 as a regular Decca issue, not an Arkiv burn:

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=4326

How interesting. Thibaudet's Ravel set has been OOP for ages but here it suddenly reappears in print - in the States - on Arkiv? And in original packaging? And for a reasonable price? Meanwhile the Amazon MP (USA) is littered with sets at inflated prices.

And still further the international Amazons don't seem to be on board with this "in print" status.   

Strangeness but good news nonetheless. Thanks.

[BobsterLobster]

Which are your favorites, BL?

My favourite by a long shot is Benjamin Grosvenor, his CD with Gaspard has some very interesting Chopin on it as well. I'm surprised Argerich wasn't included, and I'm also a huge fan of Lortie's rendition which is the recording I fell in love with that prompted me to learn the piece.

[BobsterLobster]

I am grateful to have you with us, Bob. (Hmmm, "Swedish Bob" ... wasn't that a character in a recent movie?) So far you're proving a reliable reverse barometer for me, since our tastes seem so far apart. That's not to say you're wrong and I'm right. Some like sports cars and some like luxury sedans. One person's "forceful explosion of passionate music-making" is another's "uncontrolled ham-fisted keyboard pounding."

Edit: Whoops ... that's "English Bob" I'm thinking of, Richard Harris's character in a movie recently mentioned elsewhere around these parts.

So which are you? I'm lucky enough to be driving around Europe in a convertible at the moment ;-)
I have no idea what film you're referring to, but I am actually an 'English Bob' who is living in Sweden for another week before deciding on another country to settle in for a while. I've also been living in Indonesia and Mexico for the last few years.

[Brian]

My favourite by a long shot is Benjamin Grosvenor, his CD with Gaspard has some very interesting Chopin on it as well. I'm surprised Argerich wasn't included, and I'm also a huge fan of Lortie's rendition which is the recording I fell in love with that prompted me to learn the piece.

Pianist #5 was Argerich on DG, and pianist #9 was Argerich live on EMI. I own Grosvenor, but didn't like the recording as much as you do. Some of the Chopin scherzos on that CD are terrific.

[BobsterLobster]

Pianist #5 was Argerich on DG, and pianist #9 was Argerich live on EMI. I own Grosvenor, but didn't like the recording as much as you do. Some of the Chopin scherzos on that CD are terrific.

Ah, okay! But yes, the Chopin Scherzos are 'unique', to say the least.

Edit: ah, Argerich was voted out in the first round, that's why I missed it!

[mc ukrneal]

I have no idea what film you're referring to, but I am actually an 'English Bob' who is living in Sweden ...

Unforgiven. Richard Harris character.