Search - Franz [Vienna] Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Chodos :: Schubert & Brahms

Mr Morrison says it perfectly

Peter Smith | Buffalo NY USA | 04/30/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I am so glad that Scott Morrison wrote that review. I would not add or subtract a single word. What I do want to share is an out-of-left field thought that has occurred to me.



I would love it if some bit of magic could put all the notes of the first movement of D894 into the heads and fingers of all piano-lovers who asked for them. With the notes taken care of, then we could discover (for ourselves, as it were, one by one of us) just how sublime Mr Chodos's performance is. I would guess that any great pianist would tell us that memorizing the score is the easy part: it's deciding, second by second, how to bring the music to life that separates (if you will excuse the phrase) the men from the boys. (I'm sure there's a gender-neutral set of words, but I can't think of it.)



Imagine yourself at the keyboard. "All" you have to do it to decide how long to hold a given note or chord, when to move on to the next, how to color the sound, where and when to use the pedal, and ALL THE TIME retaining the concentration Mr Morrison so rightly praises as perhaps the factor that takes this recorded performance into the ranks of the best ever. Listen again to the 20 minutes of that first movement, and see if you do not agree with me that (magically equipped with the notes) one could spend the rest of a lifetime considering the second-by-second progression. Take in the amount of time allotted to the whole notes, and to those heavenly pauses before the keys are depressed again. I have just been listening to Mr Chodos playing the Moments Musicaux and, in the slower ones, the same phenomenon occurs - I find it takes my breath away.



One could decry the inadequacies of a society which has never paid the attention to Gabriel Chodos that he deserves; but one's time would be better spent thanking whatever version of providence one espouses that he has lived among us and made these recordings - artifacts that bring immense joy whenever we choose to listen to them."