VIP Records: Beethoven Variations by Schnabel

Beethoven: Eroica & Diabelli Variations
Artur Schnabel
Recorded 1937-1938

VIP Records CL-1001 - $12.50 (US Shipping Including)

Customer Review

I can't pretend to be a Schnabel expert. My own experience with this now-controversial Beethoven specialist began around 1965, when a local San Francisco classical station commenced the "32" and played through the cycle in a succession of evenings, using the old American Angel "Great Recordings of the Century" pressings. In the context of those programs, on a mono FM station many miles from me, the Schnabel recordings did not seem appreciably inferior to many other solo piano Lp records I encountered. I noticed a continuity of sound quality that linked the Schnabels to the famous Gieseking sets I owned of Debussy and Ravel, recorded by the same company (perhaps by some of the same personnel?) fifteen years later. Unlike the then-current "wall of sound" records made in the sixties by (say) RCA Victor or Columbia, these old issues had a completely different piano tonality. Compared to the omnipresent bright American Steinways, heard in huge resonant concert halls, Schnabel and Gieseking presented their introspective and sometimes very subtle- or idiosyncratic- treatments in a smaller and more intimate proscenium. By using richer, sweeter toned instruments heard in a "real" music room of the sort one might encounter in a fine home or a music studio, the experience was less like a grand public event than a quiet sharing of ideas amongst connoisseurs.

Gradually over the next decades I acquired a smattering of Schnabel records on both 78 rpm disks and vinyl Lp. I was disappointed with the nasty sound of the Angel pressings of the Beethoven concerti; and finally, by the middle 1980s was happy to own very good alternatives that seemed to come closer to musical reality: the cycle on pre-war Victor shellac disk 78 rpm albums, of varying surface quality, augmented by a really splendid modern realization of the source material in an exceptionally clean and clear French box from "La Voix de Son Maitre". The 78 disks had a disruptive disparity of balance, as though the piano had been recorded by an entirely different type of microphone than the much fuller orchestra- as did also a Victor 78 rpm album by Schnabel and Boult of the Brahms B-Flat Concerto. One could fiddle with equalization and make one, or the other, seem correct: but always the sound failed to gel in the manner of a modern recording that used a primary set of mikes to pick up both the solo instrument and the ensemble. This, plus the very propulsive and often disjointed nature of the performances (most notably in parts of the Brahms), where Schnabel pressed ahead of his accompanists gave an edge-of-the-seat dramatic quality to the performances, rather more like live events than canned and fully planned productions. The Lp set seemed to distance one slightly from the raw event, but not intolerably. As always, the 78s seemed to capture the animalistic electricity best, despite their other defects.

I owned a tiny subset of Schnabel's original 78 rpm solo recordings too, but very few of the Beethoven sonatas on shellac. What I came to own and enjoy for the longest period of time was a big Lp box (was it on Seraphim?) sounding over-bright and clangy, with low modulation, but at least supplying the canon complete for handy reference. I confess, though, that in the seventies and eighties, I tended to look to other artists- Backhaus, Fleisher, Richter, Gilels, Kempff, Solomon, and perhaps sometimes even the mercurial Gould- for preferred listening. This period was the nadir of my Schnabel appreciation. His interpretations began to seem rather cranky and unreliable to me.

As usual, one often comes full circle with the passage of time. In recent years, though impressed with the solid, sober, and reliable musicianship of Jando (whose cycle my wife the piano teacher relies upon), not to mention the other stellar artists previously listed, now Schnabel seems to loom larger as a provocative idea-man. It may be over-familiarity that has led me to crave variety, even peculiarity, and to look to the earlier parts of the twentieth century for pianists in the old-fashioned "grand style". If so, Schnabel is an oddball. Hailed in his time as a purist and furious intellectual, a man who relied less on pianistic effects and more on exposing the inner core of Beethoven's arguments, he now seems a transitional figure caught between so many different worlds of music, or trends in interpretation.

Schnabel's playing is occasionally extroverted and even flashy. He never feared to attempt the wildest effects, which are not always brought off securely on the unedited wax masters. It is known that when confronted with the sometimes messy results, he would merely shrug off the flubs and refuse to tame his spirit with a better-controlled retake, lest some exciting part of the improvisatory outburst be blunted. Unlike the pianists of today, whose dynamic palette often seems somewhat bland and narrow in classical era works, Schnabel's contrasts of color and volume are huge: too large for the medium, resulting in barely heard passages, or those that blast (and quickly wore out the old records.) Again: he cared not, for the disks were apparently, for him, a "slice of life" imprint of the moment, rather than a scrupulous document for the ages. Yet, unlike Rachmaninoff or Padereweski or any of the other grand artists in the preceding generations, Schnabel seemed to view the instrument itself, and its suitable literature, as a vehicle not for swaying the emotions of the vast audience, carried away by the rodomontade of Liszt or the C# minor prelude, or the Military Polonaise, but as the purest means of conveying the bare bones of musical thought- and for Schnabel, that meant "German musical thought."

Ergo, Beethoven. While Victor Records' American producers, and Rachmaninoff himself, were unable to persuade the bean-counters back around 1929 that money should be invested in the great Russian artist's interpretation of the "Waldstein" Sonata, it seemed far more logical and inevitable a procedure for the elites at HMV and the supporting society of wealthy connoisseurs to empower Schnabel to record the same, only approximately five years later. And not merely the "Waldstein"; but also the entire cycle of 32 sonatas, plus important sets of variations: works large and small, early and late. Had we been bequeathed Rachmaninoff's powerful interpretation of the Sonata, Op. 53, it would have, compared to Schnabel's disks, given us an entirely alternative comprehension of the work, and surely one that remarkably differs from that of any subsequent recording. There might be superficial similarities to some aspects of Rachmaninoff's style with the modern pianistics of Horowitz, Janis, or Richter -- but it was Schnabel's considerate view of Beethoven that has yielded a definite school of interpretation. If you build upon what Schnabel proposed, adding the refinement of retakes and editing, and the caution and sobriety of wanting to create in a recording a perfect *mirror* of the printed text, in sound: you have the modern manner of playing Beethoven. It is inconceivable that what we teach and revere today as the "norm" of Beethoven style could have grown from the mannerisms or palette of Paderewski or Rachmaninoff. As such, Schnabel's performances are valuable, warts and all, for no other reason than that they provide the seed-germ of the 20th century post-Romantic (perhaps post-Freudian!) perspective of the special psychology of Beethoven, the most defining transitional figure in all of Western music.

Furthermore, the UK-Society record sets of the 1930s, though they did sometimes focus on the contributions of a particular artist- Gerhardt's Wolf, Beecham's Delius, and Schnabel's Beethoven- were not conceived as 'artists media'. They were not the means to the end of vivifying the public luster of the interpreter; rather they were conceived as explorations of the then-ignored works of important COMPOSERS. Serious scholars and musicians knew the works of Wolf or Delius or Beethoven, in depth; but the public did not. Today, when every record store has cheap CDs of every scrap of these worthies, we forget how buried and obscure much of the influential music of the great classical composers was in a society where for many, the epitome of classical music snobbery was the image of a lion-maned exotic foreigner in evening dress tossing off unplayable arpeggios in one potboiler after another... an entire concert of encores, as it were. In that milieu, a Schabel reading of the slow movement from an un-subtitled Beethoven sonata was the rarest form of inaccessible intellectual luxury, in its way like a private lecture from Professor Einstein.

So, the artifacts left to us by Schnabel are in their particularities like examples of historical musicoarcheology. And like a fatiguing but exciting dig in the dry dusty rolling hills of Ethiopia, under the burning sun, the experience is not entirely a passive one supplying only creature-comforts of existential pleasure. For as a listener to these old records, one must be involved to a certain extent, in a manner that is not at all demanded by a modern stereo (especially digital) recording.

There are defects. As mentioned above, the concerted works have sound balance problems that can really never be completely resolved, intrinsic characteristics of the masters. You can smooth them with equalization; add echoes; take out hisses and ticks; and each step of the process both adds and detracts. The recordings may superficially SEEM to be more "modern"; but they lose something of their earthy impact.

The solo piano records are problematical in a different way: the instrument is so exposed, and there is so little 'masking' available in the dryish acoustical halo, that the noises of the wax and the stampers and all subsequent processing is unremovable. Or SHOULD be unremovable; for some have tried to do it, and have indeed managed to take out all the crackle...but also the realism. As a consumer, you have distinctive choices, for so many hands have now tried to massage the Schnabel records over the generations that there is a version for almost any inclination.

I haven't heard them all. It is said that the originating company, EMI, have gone too far in removing the nuance, intrinsically jumbled with the disk noises, by using too much CEDAR declicking and muffling for their CD transfers. The earlier Lp issues were produced in an era in which the available techniques were limited. Loud snaps and clicks were hand-edited with razor blade and splicing tape. You sometimes hear "shaved notes" and little blips and discontinuities in such transfers that emanate from old vinyl 33.3 rpm reissues. (I tend to suspect that much of the 14-disk Dante set is taken from such sources.) Various Lp boxes done by RCA Victor, Angel, and HMV in the fifties through the eighties each have idiosyncratic qualities, perhaps sometimes complementary ones that frustrate the hypersensitive collector. No ONE set from any company seems to please everybody, every time. At present there is a large contingent of enthusiasts for the work of *this* gentleman, or *that* gentleman: tastes influenced by radically differing views of the legitimacy of principled decisions by differing restoration artists.

What is a bewildered musical enthusiast to make of all this contention? Well, I for one- having heard at least *some* of the 78 original disks- conclude that there is really no "perfect" transfer, no "correct" way to illuminate every nook and cranny and quality of these documents. Let us make a virtue out of the "vice" of competition, and allow that it is surely better for the collector to have a variety of approaches, all arguably legitimate *if* one accepts their first premises. There is such a *huge* range in human perception, listening skill, sound-acuity training, and playback circumstance variety, that I'd argue that perhaps the "cause" of Schnabel-study is best served by having the different viewpoints of diverse, extremely knowledgeable, dedicated, and determined individuals at the helm of the turntables and processors- even if they produce radically differing results and (frankly) HATE the alternative viewpoints of their colleagues and competitors!

As such, I have at least a small multiplicity of current CD versions of the Schnabel recordings that I like to return to regularly. So I already owned some prior CD issues of the Beethoven variations in this VIP transfer by Stephen Worth: and I am retaining them ALL, despite my enjoyment of the particular qualities that Worth has chosen to emphasize.

Worth has said, regarding his view of the sonic contents of his own set of the 78s of these performances:

Listening to those records over and over again, I got so I knew the shape of each note.

I've come to the conclusion that the secret to Schnabel isn't what EMI was concerned with correcting... the muffled frequency response; but rather maintaining the shape and color of each individual note. They're like faceted jewels, each one with its own particular attack, rise and decay.

That coincides very well with my own conception after years of contemplation of these Schnabel recordings in a variety of experiences and viewed from the most general perspective.

My wife is a specialist in teaching piano tone and touch. She has some very distinguished teachers, including two pupils of Egon Petri and Myra Hess. I thought it would be useful to give her, a trained artist who plays Beethoven regularly on her own grand piano, some contradictory examples of Schnabel transfers to get her impressions to augment my own as a mere record collector and sound buff. My wife the music professional is not much of a "phonograph" enthusiast. She rarely listens to recorded music, preferring to play the instrument herself.

I called her into my office, where I have a 300w system consisting of two tower speakers that each have 2-12 inch drivers, and four mids/tweeters: six drivers each, from a 100w/channel solid-state amp. These are augmented by a 100w powered 12" subwoofer.

This system is a kind of "subset" of the better "mid-hi end" one I used to employ when I owned and operated a recording studio; yet it suffices for my current interest primarily in musical artists and interpretations regardless of the time period of the recording. That being said, this system is basically most satisfactory on modern DDD's. Old flawed recordings often don't pass muster on this system, which reveals a bit too much of noises or rumbles or distortion, so I sometimes play flawed historical items in our big music teaching studio with its "minimalist" cheap stereo system used merely for auditioning brief examples during piano lessons.

But using my 'best' system, the one in my office that tends to be most revealing of sonic defects, I set up some comparisons of my four transfers of the Diabelli variations for us to evaluate. On the office system, with no changes from my standard room equalization settings, the VIP transfer seemed to sound best *to me*. It is the noisiest in the lower middle, but also the most realistic (and that faint background noise is quite slight, and inoffensive); but the "sanitized" one in the Philips "Great Pianists" series is *much* noisier at the top end: hissy and strident. The Philips at first seems impressive, even more "hi fi"; but as you listen, it becomes apparent that the shape of each loud note is altered: sounds squashed, with a kind of vague IM-ey distortion. I even suspected that the old analog transfer supplied for that set had been slightly compressed, altering the rise-time of loud notes. Or, if the tape oxide used had not been very linear and the transfer engineer employed a rather "hot" recording level with insufficient headroom. It is just NOT the accurate sense of dynamics that one hears either from a live piano, or a modern recording (or from the VIP CD version.)

The VIP transfer seemed to me best by far at capturing that palpable pianistic realism. The piano tone is fuller and richer. The loud notes do not seem a bit crunchy. The absence of that Philips hissing is most pleasant for long-term listening.

Actually, the inexpensive Dante box isn't entirely and simplisitically "bad". It *is* very quiet (beneficial to those who hate disk noises and hissing); but is sadly also very thin. The color and fullness of the middle register is wrung out, and the bass has to be greatly increased. Even with a boosted bottom end, the sound is "removed" from reality as if by too much electronic gadgetry and intervening stages; yet there is nothing palpably wrong. No distorted breakups; but no vividness.

In that regard, I liked the VIP transfer best.

I called my wife in to listen. I should add that she has failed to like some well-regarded transfers of certain famous historical recordings, being put off by hissing and "mechanical" quality of piano tone, since her reference is the live sound of a good instrument played by her in a large spacious room. So with some apprehension I put on all four of my Schnabel-Diabellis for her.

Without any prompting from me she came to almost the same conclusions that I did. She thought the VIP edition sounded most natural and full. She despised the hissing in the Philips and found the sound unclean. The one disagreement we had is that she felt that for her own long-term enjoyment she'd rather have the dead dark sanitized sound of the Dante, than even the slight trace of surface in the VIP or other competitive transfers with sensible, minimal filtering. The Philips, however, really offended her sensibilities.

Now, she did agree that for the REALITY of the piano tone, given four very limited examples of a basically old pre-hi fi recording, the VIP came closest to what she has accustomed herself to hearing from modern records. The little noises of the instrument- the wood and thumps of the mechanism- are clearest. It is much closer to life.

Conspicuous in their absence in these comparisons were two of the independent-producer transfers that are most lauded by collectors. I don't at present have them and frankly am not altogether certain that I *need* either one. I have heard others in the same series of Schnabel restorations by both engineers, and they are excellent though markedly different. One does wonder, however, if having *six* transfers of this same performance of the Diabelli variations is exactly justified... especially in view of the excellent quality of the VIP production.