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Vladimir Horowitz Live at Carnegie Hall: 1943-1978. Deluxe limited edition including 300 page book. Sony 88765484172 (41 CDs & 1 DVD).
This set contains seventeen complete recitals, most of them presented in their entirety for the first time. There are also three recordings with orchestra, a chamber music concert, excerpts of ten other recitals and the first release on DVD of an appearance on television.
Carnegie Hall was central to Horowitz' career since his debut there in 1928. Of course he played regularly in many other great auditoriums in the USA. However, Carnegie Hall remained the leading place for his musical activities in America until 1978. After that, he turned toward Avery Fisher Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, coming back to the 57th Street hall only in 1985. In total, Horowitz performed nearly one hundred times at Carnegie Hall.
After his debut concert in 1920, Horowitz played more than 300 times in Russia between 1921 and 1925, including a fantastic feat: eleven concerts in Petrograd in autumn, 1924 without playing the same work twice and again in January 1925 in nine other concerts. From 1926 to 1936, he toured extensively out of his country with great success everywhere he played, ending each season with a recital in Paris, often at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées or Salle Pleyel. After a first break and a last European tour in 1938-1939, his career became an exclusively American one. In the forties, two kinds of novelties appeared regularly in his programs: a good amount of newly composed sonatas and a lot of transcriptions of his own. At this point he only gave approximately forty concerts each year, less than in the previous decades, but this time numerous concerts were recorded.
CD 1: Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1, Op. 23 with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on 25 April 1943. This famous rendition was broadcast live (and released sixteen years later). The circumstances were very special. It was clearly a patriotic event, the tickets having been replaced by war bonds. It was the only appearance of Horowitz in several weeks because he had cancelled all others after the death of Rachmaninoff. Horowitz and Toscanini succeeded in subsuming their emotion in a very masterful and electrifying rendition, more balanced than...