Maybe the microphones, placed by Peter Bartok in M.I.T.’s Kresge Hall, were particularly sensitive or perhaps Levy was merely inattentive to manual care. Listen, especially, to the passages here and here. (Listeners with better sound systems will hear the clicking more readily, especially at the faster sections.) I remember laughing about the first observation: It was the sound of Levy’s fingernails clicking on the keys. Moreover, these three moments remind me, over two decades later, not only of how far we’ve come in the area of performance and analysis but, also, of our limits. They have continued to broaden my thinking about performers, interpretation, recordings, structure, analysis, form, tonality, listening, the body, and sound. Multiple re-listenings later, these three elements of the recorded performance still enchant me, drawing me into Levy’s aesthetic as an interpreter and into Liszt’s skill as a pianist-composer. But this first experience remains a vivid part of my memory-three moments in particular. At that time-before I started graduate school-I had not yet developed any of the tools I now use to analyze or reflect on recorded performances, nor had I read and understood Levy’s own writings on the Liszt Sonata. In the winter of 1997 I first heard Ernst Levy’s 1956 recording of the Liszt B minor Piano Sonata in the studio of Ward Marston, whose eponymous label would later release a transfer of the performance onto CD.
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