Riccardo Schwartz Plays Beethoven

Started by Todd, March 17, 2024, 09:47:49 AM

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Todd




Riccardo Schwartz's LvB sonata cycle is a milestone.  I will just jump to the punchline: this is the worst complete cycle I have ever heard.  For years, my fifth tier has contained the same four names: HJ Lim, Rita Bouboulidi, Tatiana Nikolayeva, and Anne Øland, more or less in that order.  Mr Schwartz blows right on by them.  As much as I may dislike the cycles by the four named pianists, I can at least detect artistic intentions.  Lim was brash, young, full of piss and vinegar, and she wanted to deliver a cycle that shook things up.  Mostly, the cycle just sucks, but it has its moments – Op 57 sticks in memory.  (I had a full cycle summary written up but lost it when my hard drive crapped out.)  Bouboulidi, past her prime, played the fast movements slow and the slow movements fast, but she had a consistent vision.  Nikolayeva, past her prime, dropped notes in a manner that would make elderly Cortot blush, but one could easily hear the serious artistic intent.  Øland, dour, grim, and rough, was very much a serious pianist and artist. 

Schwartz lacks the positive traits mentioned.  Some appalling, mortifying, and ultimately just boring mannerisms appear right in Op 2/1 and pervade the entire undertaking.  Tempi are generally very, very, very slow.  Op 7 clocks in around forty minutes; the opening to 106 takes over fifteen minutes and is the worst ever recorded; and the opening (absolutely not an) Allegro of Op 28 comes in just under sixteen minutes to open just shy of thirty-seven minutes of misery, to offer just three extreme examples.  The sustain pedal almost sounds like it was weighed down with a brick in some places.  Desynchronization of hands can be artful (think ABM), but not here, where it just sounds like the pianist can't play the notes.  Rubato is so extreme and so inane that it moves past distracting mannerism straight to boredom, in the very first sonata.  Pregnant pauses are the musical equivalent of troubled elephant pregnancies.  Big dynamic contrasts mostly sound sloppy and artless.  Phrasing runs the gamut from constipated to diarrheal.  Schwartz demonstrates chops in places, so this musical abortion is purposeful.  Op 10/1 brings this home, with an opening movement possessed of speed and agility, though limited dynamics, only to be followed by a bore-the-listener to death Adagio.  Op 78 further reinforces this by actually sounding decent and having some novel ideas, and both Opp 109 and 110, while not top fifty material, do not sound awful.  (Op 111, however, is a freakin' trainwreck.)  As if the annoying AF mannerisms weren't enough, Op 22 starts off ridiculously slow, moves to quicker playing, then just stops, some Italian blabbering occurs, then the whole thing starts over.  This raises questions about the nature of this project.  Is it an amateur project, like John Kane's openly amateur cycle, just put together shoddily and with far less artistic merit?  Is it a fraud?  Or is it performance art, poking fun at high art in general?  If it is the last, it may succeed in places.  If not, it is one of the greatest failures in the history of art.

As I have noted before, I am a big fan of interventionist playing, but the result has to be not so much "musical" (that word has no useful meaning for me in this context), but music.  After a few sonatas, this cycle tipped over from appalling to just comically bad.  So bad.  I can't possibly offer details on a sonata and movement level basis.  As one sign of how bad this cycle is, I never listened to more than one sonata in a sitting.  Not even Op 49.  That's a new level of bad.  It also took just shy of three months to slog through this disaster.  To put Schwartz's badness into numeric context, his cycle by itself is bad enough to drop the country of Italy from 5th to tied for 13th place with the UK in my ranking system.  This is because I was forced to create a new Sixth Tier just for this cycle.  Seriously, I'll take Gould every day of the week and thrice on Sundays over this clown going forward. 


The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

Brian

OK, after seeing the new rankings list, I had to visit this thread, which I missed at the time while on vacation. Wow! Goodness! You really should have inflicted more of it on yourself, though, because the specific digs and insults here are so juicy.  ;D

I just went straight to the first movement of Op. 22 and listened with incredulity, even though you had accurately described it, to the error-filled first false start, stopping, and Italian people talking with each other, before he started playing again. Hopefully an Italian GMGer can listen and translate for us, but I think I hear Schwartz saying it's too "profane." Leaving this in the track, do they think they're Miles Davis?

The thing that most distressed me listening to Op. 22 and then to Op. 31 No. 3 (I switched midway because 33 is shorter and therefore less punishing) was not the basically ridiculously slow tempi, but the fact that those tempi are unstable. He can speed up for a section...even (sigh) slow down further for a section...but there is no sense or reason to it. He can build up real momentum (Op. 31 No. 3's scherzo has real promise in places!) before killing it because momentum is the enemy. Combined with the separate hands thing, and the occasional wrong note or deliberately shortchanged note length, it feels like slow-motion motion sickness.

I concur in the judgment. This is somebody who could do better, and chooses not to. His biography online says that he was mentored for years by Paul Badura-Skoda, thereby inheriting the grand tradition of Edwin Fischer. I assume it says that because those two men are dead and cannot sue for libel.

hopefullytrusting

Lol. Two of the best reviews I've ever read. Thank you Todd and Brian, as I am still chuckling. ;D