Casa Jonsson

My record collection is not enormous, but I do own multiple recordings of some of my favorite music. Today I’ll give you two 25-second clips of a single piece performed by two different musicians. The recordings are separated by more than 50 years, but the musical effects are light-years apart.

The finest keyboardist I know personally once told me that Gabriel Fauré’s Sonata No. 1 in A major for violin and piano has the most difficult piano part of any violin sonata—this from a performer who makes everything look easy. It certainly serves to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. First, listen to Emanuel Bay play the first 22 measures of this piece ( hi-fi or  lo-fi).

Now listen to Jean-Yves Thibaudet play the same passage ( hi-fi or  lo-fi).

Amazing, isn’t it? Apart from Bay’s wrong notes (a smudged B-natural in the bass at the end of measure two and a mashed C-sharp in the treble at the end of measure 19), you would transcribe them exactly the same way on paper. But Bay steams through this defenseless music like an oil tanker in the middle of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, pounding the octaves in the bass like so much industrial noise pollution, scaring away the cute little animals and leaving a black slick in his wake.

Thibaudet, on the other hand, dips his sculler’s oars in the water and skims across it. First, notice the subtleties of his timing: the first three notes are perfectly positioned in space, a carefully balanced mobile; the momentum of each of the first two phrases gently subsides and then propels the passage forward in fleetness and flight to its end; he allows the decisive final chord to breathe momentarily before deferring to the violin. Next, listen to his enormous dynamic range, which he wields not as a weapon to do violence to the music but as a complement to his superb timing. His articulation illuminates and clarifies waters that are often murky and muddy in lesser pianists’ hands. Finally, he strikes an impressive balance between variation and an organic unity (the first two phrases are coherent but not identical), allowing the music to speak for itself even as he expresses himself through it. It is difficult to imagine what more Fauré could ask of any interpreter.

To be fair, I ought to point out a few things that make the playing field a little uneven. Emanuel Bay was accompanist to Jascha Heifetz from 1934 to 1954, one of three pianists to work for Heifetz during his reign as international superstar of the violin from his Carnegie Hall debut in 1917 to his final recital in Los Angeles in 1972. And these men were indeed “accompanists” who worked for Heifetz rather than “collaborators” who worked with him. (Today, A-list violinists and other instrumentalists almost always seek out pianists of comparable stature as collaborators, and sonatas are prepared and performed as chamber music rather than solo literature with accompaniment.) It is said that Brooks Smith, Bay’s successor, was never on a first-name basis with Heifetz during the decades of their professional relationship. Laboring under the shadow of a musical persona such as Heifetz’s cannot have fostered in Bay feelings of artistic ownership.

Technical standards for instrumentalists were also lower in 1936 than they are now, or were in 1988, Heifetz’s superhuman fiddling notwithstanding. Doubtless an idol like Heifetz in today’s world—even one uninterested in sharing the stage with a world-class concert artist—would settle for nothing less than technical brilliance on the part of an accompanist. This is because there are so many more music-career contenders in today’s global economy, and there is arguably far less per-capita demand for classical musicians’ skills due to competition from television, video games and other entertainment. So Bay probably didn’t stack up as poorly against his contemporaries as he would against today’s pianists.

The last two factors are technological. It is obvious that the two recordings are worlds apart in terms of dynamic range, frequency response and noise. Recording engineers are much better these days at creating the illusion of warm-blooded physical presence. (But compare  the hi-fi of Bay to  the lo-fi of Thibaudet if you like; it still won’t remotely allow you to confuse Thibaudet’s playing with Bay’s.) Finally, the time-limitations and high cost of recording today are nothing like what they were 70 years ago. I imagine that Heifetz and Bay stepped into the studio and ran the entire program through no more than twice, at tempos dictated by the duration of 78-RPM sides. Then they had to live with the inevitable flaws in one version or another. By contrast, although recording artists today spend big money on studio time and mastering, they can punch in to correct flubs, they can make the music last as long as they want and they can re-record it as many times as their studio budget will allow. Under more favorable circumstances there is no way Heifetz would have allowed Bay’s wrong notes to mar the opening of a violin sonata.

All things considered, it is still difficult to forgive Emanuel Bay for musical manslaughter. And Jean-Yves Thibaudet still freezes my spine when I listen to him begin Fauré’s opus 13.

In case you’re interested in adding to your library, there are plenty of good things about the rest of this Heifetz record, and although it’s very hard to find these days you should definitely search for a copy of the Thibaudet record (collaborating with violinist Joshua Bell).