Simon Barere

National Review, March 19, 1990 by William F. Rickenbacker

LISTENING TO THE new issues of studio recordings left behind by some of the fabled pianists of two generations ago, one wonders where the craft of pianism took its wrong turn. When I was born, there were students of Franz Liszt still active on the recital circuit, and with them the Romantic Tradition was still in full throat. A young outfit in England (Archive Piano Recordings, Box 57, Horsham, West Sussex RH13 7YZ) has been retrieving the old master recordings from the studio files and dubbing from rare survivors of commercial releases in order to bring out a series of complete discographies of some of those heroic figures. So far, APR has brought out albums of the playing of Moritz Rosenthal (then in his seventies, but still wonderful in many ways), Benno Moisewitsch ("a revelation!" cried my old piano teacher, hearing his recording of the Rachmaninoff transcription of the "Scherzo" from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream), Leopold Godowsky ("the Buddha"), and now Simon Barere, perhaps the most volcanic of all.

Born in Odessa in 1986, Barere is said by some accounts to have supported his large family when little more than a child by playing in clubs and taverns around town. At the age of 15 he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The Communists took over the country when he was 21. He was graduated at the age of 23, winning the Rubinstein (Anton, not Artur) prize and a professorship at the Kiev Conservatory. He was 33 before he was permitted to emigrate from the Workers' Paradise. He settled in Berlin just as Hitler was consolidating his sway over what had been Europe's most civilized nation. He removed to London in 1934, made a great splash with his debut recital, and was invited to make the recordings we now have, done in the years 1934-1936. Hitler waxed great and mighty, and Barere moved again, this time to America the Beautiful, and here he established the remainder of his career. But the Second World War paralyzed such things, and by 1950, the older pianists of his generation safely out to pasture, Barere was ready to claim his own. In April of 1951 he sat down in Carnegie Hall to play the Grief concerto. Scarcely into the first movement, he fell off his piano stool, dead from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Olin Downes, the New York Times critic, covered that event, and found himself writing an obituary:

There was no more modest, studious,

and sincere artist. Others sought the

limelight more aggressively. Mr. Barere

was concerned with only one thing, the

humble service of music. He had a

prodigious repertory, a prodigious technique.

It may be added that he was a prodigious

musician, which is not necessarily the

same thing. His knowledge was such that

many pianists, great and small, sought

his counsel as coach and teacher. He

leaves not only a great but an enviable

reputation behind him.

Mr. Downes's successor, Harold Schonberg, sought to diminish Barere's gifts. In his book The Great Pianists (1963), he refers to Barere at one point as merely a "workman," and in his major mention says, "Barere was a virtuoso-plus: not one of the remarkable musical minds, but a playing mechanism [mechanism!] startling for speed, accuracy, and disregard of difficulties. Barere, too, had a fine, colorful tone. The harder the music--Don Juan Fantasy, Islamey--the more Barere reveled in it, and the faster he played it." Period.

It is the playing that one must judge for oneself. If one understands and enjoys the Romantic Tradition in pianistic performance, then here is glory enough. In a recorded performance of Liszt, Chopin, Balakirev, Blumenfeld (his teacher, and also the teacher of Horowitz), Glazunov, Scriabin, Godowsky transcriptions or paraphrases, and Schumann, he gives the listener everything the piano is capable of. Passagework flies by so fast, even without pedal, that the effect is an iridescence of sound. The ferocity of the Tradition is omnipresent: subtle slow passages are interrupted by the shrieks of hawks, love poems are intercepted by artillery and bolts of lightning, moods change within a fraction of a second, everything is freedom of rhythm and texture and emotion, nothing can be predicted, all is up for grabs, the world is unsafe for spinsters. This is musical violence.

Most of the time--and here I obtrude an opinion--the Tradition works. But in the smaller pieces, as in the Chopin waltz, it may be that the lion has gestured too grandly whilst pouncing on a salon mouse. I understand what he intended, or think I do: to string together a disparate bunch of melodies on a constantly glittering carrier wave. But the musical structure of Chopin's little narration doesn't seem (to me) to support such grandiosity. It is a miscalculation on Barere's part, but a wondrous one anyway. No one can play those connective passages better.

Speaking of mere playing--that is, technique--I set the metronome a-going while he was dashing through Schumann's Toccata, and caught him doing 144 to the quarter-note. In that score, for the standard thematic passage, this means he is playing 33.6 notes per second. They are all as clear as a bell. In my score the recommended speed is 100. But at a certain point one must admire the ferocity, the truculence, the heroism, the grandiosity, the theatricality, the dramaturgy of such a performance. Catch me if you can! I can whip any kid in town!