As Barry Bonds, so Mr. Horowitz

YOU don’t have to be a sports nut to be aware of the brouhaha surrounding Barry Bonds, who’s inched past Babe Ruth’s lifetime total of 714 home runs and is gunning for Henry Aaron’s 755. Bonds’ pursuit of baseball’s most famous home run records -- allegedly fueled by various performance-enhancing substances and further soured by his almost gleeful contempt for a press corps that gives him so much attention -- is fodder for network news shows and talking heads alike.

And now, you’re going to read about him in the arts section of your newspaper.

No, Bonds is not about to make his debut as the Fourth Tenor or a composer, thank goodness. It’s just that a music critic who also happens to be a baseball fan was thinking about Bonds one lazy afternoon as he watched the surly slugger on the tube being granted yet another intentional walk. He wondered why a gifted athlete -- one of the best of his time, one who was headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame anyway for his rare combination of speed and power -- would want to jeopardize his health and his reputation by taking steroids. Why grab an extra artificial edge when he already had a natural edge over just about everyone else in the game?

Then, it occurred to me that there was something weirdly familiar about Bonds’ situation. With a mighty leap of subjects and conventional logic, I made the connection: Vladimir Horowitz’s piano!

Stay with me on this. Horowitz was a marvel, a great athlete in his field, able to accomplish stupendous feats with his fingers. Other pianists used to stare in baffled amazement as he unleashed the most dazzling orchestra-like sonorities and barely whispering soft passages on his piano. No other pianist could summon such visceral, physical power in live performance. The recordings don’t do his sound justice; you had to be there, as I was lucky enough to be on three occasions.

But in his last years, Horowitz was also accused of having an extra edge. Rumors swirled that to achieve his effects, he had his technicians doctor his personal piano, the Steinway CD 503 -- for example, loosening the action, the mechanism by which a downward pressure on the keys is translated into a forward motion of the hammers toward the strings. Cynics wondered how much of Horowitz’s genius could be attributed to the piano he played exclusively.

Moreover, Horowitz took his instrument wherever he performed -- unlike most mortals, who have to rely on the often-dubious pianos at hand. TV crews would cover the amusing spectacle of the piano being hoisted out of his New York apartment by a crane, to be shipped as far as Moscow. He also had the power to order his record labels to record him on that piano at home -- which they did, gladly, because new Horowitz albums always shot to No. 1 on the classical charts.

Although it’s true that tweaking a piano is not illegal, hardly like ingesting a banned substance, one effect resembles that of steroids. According to “Game of Shadows,” the recent bestseller that blew the whistle on Bonds, one of the properties of steroids is that they can reduce the effects of fatigue, permitting ballplayers to ignore pain and concentrate on hitting or throwing. A looser action on a keyboard does something similar: You can play runs and scales faster and for a longer period of time with less muscle fatigue. In that sense, you could say that Horowitz’s instrument was like a piano on steroids.

Unlike baseball fans, though, music lovers actually had some golden opportunities to check out this phenomenon for themselves. WIth the cooperation of Steinway’s piano dealerships in various cities, Horowitz’s piano was taken on tour in the 1990s -- just the piano, the maestro having died in 1989 -- for the public to sample. You didn’t have to be a professional; anyone could sign up for 10 minutes and play anything he or she wanted. There was a photographer to take your picture, and everyone received a certificate attesting that yes, I played the Horowitz piano.

The piano landed in Los Angeles at the old Sherman Clay store on Wilshire Boulevard in July 1993 and at the current Steinway dealer, Fields Pianos in West L.A., in July 1999. Word from other cities on the tour had it that even rank amateurs sounded a lot better on the CD 503. Naturally, I couldn’t resist. I signed up on both tours, and on the second one, I got lucky. There were no other sign-ups the morning I arrived, so I was able to play the CD 503 for a whole hour!

There, beside a reproduction of an oil painting of Horowitz, the icon stood, an ordinary-looking concert grand with old-fashioned yellowed ivory keys (because of the animal rights movement, ivory isn’t used anymore). I touched them, and the action felt unusually light, with little of the springy weight of other grand pianos. I rippled a D-flat major scale up and down the keyboard, and the keys seemed to take off from under my fingers, a force unto themselves.

I tried a number of pieces -- the Aria from J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, some Beethoven bagatelles, Haydn sonatas, Satie’s “Gymnopedies,” lots of improvised jazz. The bass notes sounded gloriously gruff, the middle range and treble rather hard and brilliant. The simple Satie miniatures never sounded more haunting or lingering -- at least to me.

Yet by the end of my sessions, I had to conclude that the CD 503 was not the sole reason for Horowitz’s superhuman edge. His piano could make it easier to do certain things -- trills came off effortlessly, the pedaling was smooth and faultless. But the action was so light that at times it was difficult to maintain control of fast passagework, much as with feather-touch power-steering on a car. The dynamic range seemed not much wider than that of other grand pianos of this size, not what I remembered from Horowitz’s concerts. I tried in vain to simulate the sonority of his mighty octaves; it would not come. The piano could not magically correct wrong notes, insufficiently flexible fingers or a lax foot on the pedal.

Obviously, Horowitz took most of his sound to the grave. Part of it was his unique set of natural physical gifts. Part of it was his extraordinary ear for color. Yet another was a sense of musicianship hard-wired in the Romantic era (after all, he had played for Scriabin as a child and knew Rachmaninoff well). And certainly, a good part of it was hard work.

To make an analogy to baseball, if steroids were the sole route to improved performance, then dozens of banjo hitters might have made a run at the Babe during the so-called steroids era. We still don’t know who partook and who didn’t, but only a gifted handful of ballplayers actually put up historic numbers in that time. The juice, like a tweaked piano, might make you perform better, but it can’t make you a master.

Yet I never played Bach or Fats Waller better in my life than I did on Horowitz’s piano. And it was inspiring, thrilling, an experience I’d recommend to anyone should the instrument ever pass through your town.

Now you must excuse me. In the words of Gary Graffman, I really should be practicing. On my own humble baby grand.