Worst Recordings

[Luke]

At risk of getting shot down, I have to say that although I recognize the flaws in many of Bartos' recordings sometimes his extreme interpretations can hit on a real gem. His disc of Chopin Preludes, for instance, has some extraordinarily strange interpretations, including some ultra-stretched-out tempi which don't really work and test one's patience, but also some very beautiful and lucid ones. His reading of the tiny, minor, Contredance - one of the fillers on that disc - is my favorite version of that piece, because he takes it seriously and invests it with a bit of poetry that no one else finds. At the very least he certainly 'has the chops,' as someone said earlier. In the example I gave in the OP Geoffrey Saba has slipped over and dropped his chops all over the floor. It renders that disc embarrassingly unlistenable, not because of dodgy interpretative ideas but because we don't get as far as interpretation. He. Can't. Play. It.

[AnotherSpin]

Okay, I had to go listen to this guy. W.T.F. was that WTC. I've not played the piano in well over a decade, and I am 100 percent confident I can phrase the WTC better. He's so bad, it almost makes me want to. That he might have been paid to record that is infuriating!

I have listened to, if not all, then many recordings by Tzimon Barto, and I often liked what I heard. Of course, one has to be prepared for the fact that he plays not quite the way it is traditionally approved (approved by whom, by the way?).

[Todd]

At the very least he certainly 'has the chops,' as someone said earlier.

Barto obviously can play extremely well (Distler notes this), and extremely beautifully.  The 18th variation from the Rach Paganini variations, which I revisited yesterday, is exquisitely beautiful, more than from many famous pianists, for instance.  It's worth remembering that he recorded for EMI for a while, and generally speaking, major labels, when they were still major, did not sign just anybody.  Of course, if one looks at the EMI covers and copy from the time, he can be looked at as the American Pogorelich, which he kind of is or was.  Pogorelich's Haydn slow movements, for instance, are as perverse as anything Barto has done.  Barto made the comment regarding his tendency to distort scores to the effect that he can't harm great scores any more than he could hurt the state of David by throwing paint on it.  The paint would be washed off and forgotten.  He's purposely "provocative".