COMPACT DISC REVIEW : Early Horowitz on a Roll--of Paper

Thanks to the media--and recordings--Vladimir Horowitz at 84 still seems so contemporary that it is difficult to relate him to the long bygone age of the player piano.

But in 1926 the young Horowitz, then 22, signed a contract with the enterprising Welte Mignon company to record selected works by Bach-Busoni, Mozart-Liszt, Schubert-Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Horowitz himself. The last, “Moment Exotique,” is probably the only readily available example of Horowitz’s early attempts at composition, efforts that at one point he seems to have taken seriously.

Not that “Moment Exotique” invites serious consideration. It is little more than a light and graceful salon piece, written for the sole purpose of displaying the performer’s facile accomplishments. The piece pays its debt to the then-modern style of Debussy and his acolytes and stirs no waves.

But the 1926 Horowitz recordings for Welte Mignon are another story. Welte Mignon was the ingenious product of the famous piano factory of M. Welte and Sons of Freiburg, Germany. The Welte Mignon reproducing apparatus was electrically operated, activated through electrical impulses by a method still guarded as a company secret.

Music was recorded as perforations on a continuous sheet of paper unrolling in front of a kind of grill that regulated the amount of air permitted to pass through the perforations. In its later versions, the player piano, known in the United States as Duo Art and Ampico, became a profitable adjunct to the piano business of the 1920s and early 1930s.

The Welte Mignon reproducing mechanism was not incorporated in the body of the instrument as were later American versions. The Welte Mignon was housed in a portable cabinet known as the Vorsetzer , which was placed in front of the keyboard with plungers over each key--and which depressed the key when activated by an electrical impulse recorded on the perforated paper roll.

The strength of the electrical impulse depended upon the gentle or violent manner in which the key originally had been depressed by the recording pianist. All this original recording--the notes and even expressive designation--were then transferred to a perforated roll that could be duplicated for commercial purposes. The result was an often astonishing duplication of the original performance.

1926 was an important year for the young Horowitz. It was the year of his almost-accidental debut as a pianist of international importance, when he was called upon to play the Tchaikovsky Concerto in Hamburg as a last-minute substitute for the ailing soloist originally scheduled. This was the concert at which the conductor, Eugen Pabst, was so overwhelmed by what he heard that he stopped conducting and stepped off the podium to watch Horowitz at the keyboard.

Horowitz’s early Welte Mignon recordings of that same year have now been transferred to a compact disc put out under the apparently double label of Intercord/Gema (INT 860-864). The only deficiency seems to be a bass that only occasionally rings out with characteristic Horowitzian clangor. This could, of course, be attributed to the piano, brand unnamed, on which Horowitz recorded.

Still, the middle and upper registers are amazingly vital and life-like. The tone quality is natural, the Horowitz singing tone sounds forth, beautifully nuanced, the cadenzas ripple, and the octaves and chords are of typical Horowitzian resonance. Except for the bass, the piano tone has all the effect of the recent recording techniques.

One feels that the playing and the recording present at least a 95% faithfulness to the original sound. And the playing is invaluable as an example of what Horowitz’s playing was like in 1926. It has not the mellowness, the breadth, the authority of such recent samples of Horowitz as the London and the Soviet recordings. But it is still a document of historical significance.

The recorded program consists of the Adagio from Bach’s C-major Organ Toccata as transcribed by Busoni; the rarely played Liszt Fantasy on two themes from Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro” (“Voi che sapete” and “Non piu andrai”) in Busoni’s expansion of Liszt; the Schubert-Liszt “Botschaft”; two etudes and two mazurkas by Chopin; Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G minor, and Horowitz’s own “Moment Exotique.”