Simon Barere

[thracozaag]

I went to a rehearsal of William Kapell one time. He played the Rachmaninoff Rhapsodie. After it was all over and the orchestra left, he kept on playing the same part over and over again.
Zongora

  *Extremely jealous* (and that certainly sounds like Kapell's m.o., heh)

koji

[stevie]

  *Extremely jealous* (and that certainly sounds like Kapell's m.o., heh)

koji

yep, just like busoni, obsessively practicing always to attain perfection, possibly.

[zongora]

btw are you hungarian?? zongora is means piano if i am not wrong

Yes -- I'm of Hungarian nationality.

[demented cow]

thanks you Zongora for the interesting posts. If you had the time & inclination, it would be cool if you tried to contact the record companies releasing recordings of old pianists (e.g. APR for Barere) so that you can provide them with eyewitness descriptions of the concerts which they can draw on in writing the sleeve notes for the cds; you'd be providing interesting info and maybe they'll give you a free cd or something in return.

The remark about Barere sweating profusely might explain why the live recordings contain far more inaccuracies in chord playing etc. than the studio recordings (an alternative explanation would be in-studio cheating devices like splicing, but then he does enough wrong notes in the studio for splicing to be unlikely).

I read some other Barere annecdotes in a book about a pianist called Isador Goodman (who is unjustly unknown outside Australia) written by his wife, also a pianist. Goodman had the same manager as Barere and Mr and Mrs Goodman had contact with him. She wrote that he was the kind of person who would 'devour two chickens before a concert and two women after it'. (I didn't know there were groupies between the days of Liszt and the rock 'n roll ear.)
She also said she heard some tapes of him playing a Chopin sonata, and that the performance, though too fast, showed a singing tone that only the greats can produce.  There's no mention of a Chopin sonata in any Barere discography I have seen. Someone should try to find her address and ask her where the hell the tapes are (though she is probably dead now and I don't fancy ringing my way through several pages of Goodman phone numbers in the Sydney phone book...).

[minor_seventh]

 :)Saw the forum comments on Simon Barere so signed up, which makes this my first post!    Back in the 1950s while browsing a record store in Toronto I saw a disc by Barere entitled "Simon Barere Farewell" which I bought for about $1.   I knew the name but had never heard him perform.  It's a recording of a live concert at Carnegie Hall, don't know when.  Having read the comments of others here, I agree that he had a colossal technique but I got the impression that he didn't know how to control it.  On this disc he is playing some Rachmaninov, Schumann, Liszt, Balakirev's Islamey (which frankly is a mess) and the Blumenfeld left hand study, which for me is the highlight.  However, the disc was very poorly recorded dynamically and wouldn't make the grade these days.  I digitized the disc and put it on CD, if anyone's interested in hearing some of it.

[keyboardkat]

Clavier magazine did an article on Barere some years ago, with a lot of quotes by his son.
Apparently the son was backstage at Carnegie hall when Barere died onstage.
He was playing the Grieg concerto.  The first movement went flawlessly.  The stroke apparently occured during the orchestral introduction to the second movement.   I've read accounts that his head bent lower and lower until it was resting on the keyboard, and then he rolled off the bench to his left.
The son says that Barere never owned a piano (!).   He practiced when he could.  Otherwise he practiced mentally.  Could this have something to do with his wrong notes.  He apparently had a very high metabolism, so his muscles didn't stiffen, and that could explain the incredible speed.

[sevencircles]

He apparently had a very high metabolism, so his muscles didn't stiffen, and that could explain the incredible speed.

Metabolism doesn´t have anything to do with playing fast in general.

Some people  have extreme reflexes and motorics. I first heard about Barere from Shawn Lane, another musician that had abnormal motorics and reflexes.

Some of the pianogiants have truly outstanding reflexes like  Hofmann, Horowitz, Hamelin and in particular Ciccolini.