September 24, 1999
9:38 p.m.

I've been fetishing on this piece of music lately, listening to it all day every day at the office. CDs by Grigory Ginzburg and Sviatoslav Richter. Richter takes this piece very seriously, Ginzburg (as usual) a little flippantly. But Horowitz, as I now remember, rapes the score. I'm looking up in between typing these sentences and asking "What the fuck was that? How can you do that? That's impossible!"

In 1989 Life Magazine did a year-end spot on all the famous people who died that year, and Horowitz was in there. I think Karajan was, too. They had a picture of Horowitz bowing at the end of a Carnegie Hall concert and he was quoted (as best I can recall right now) as saying "The score is not a Bible, and I am not afraid to dare." No shit, pal.

I wonder if it is still true that the printed word is considered gospel. Do people still believe anything they read or hear just because they spent their time reading or listening to it? Do people still believe everything MSNBC says just because someone said it? And what of Camelot?

I've been thinking about this lately. Having not listened to any Horowitz CDs for about 7 or 8 months I was starting to wonder if they were as insane and crazy as I remembered. I've been listening to almost everybody else these months. Richter, Rachmaninoff, Cortot, Petri, Barere, Ginzburg, Gilels, Zhukov, Oborin, et cetera.

Now that I'm letting him in again (I have a full shelf of Horowitz CDs) it feels like college. Like that day at Oberlin I watched Horowitz 78 rpm platters from the 1940s spin and skip and I flipped each disk every 3 or 4 minutes like I was on crack cocaine. Hearing Horowitz among the rest of the pianists on record is like never having had the gift of hearing until right now.

Fleisher says Horowitz doped his piano. Michael Ponti recently released a "Ponti Plays Horowitz's Piano" CD. What an asshole.

OK, then. Enough about me.