Nowadays a concert can be recorded on someone's cell phone. Quality may be dismal, but in the YouTube era the quantity of homemade recordings is overwhelming. It wasn't always so. In classical music, until recently, great performances evaporated into the air every night. However, some performers managed to record themselves privately as an aural journal of their work or as a means of assessing their own musicianship.
One classical star that routinely recorded his recitals, Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989), donated his mono acetate discs of Carnegie Hall concerts to Yale University shortly before his death. The Horowitz collection is a mother lode for devotees of the virtuoso pianist. Sony Masterworks has issued a pair of CDs from the Yale archives, Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie HallThe Private Collection: Mussorgsky & Liszt and Schumann, Chopin, Liszt &Balakirev.
The recordings, dating from the late 1940s, contain no surprises for fans but fill a gap in his recording career for students and chroniclers of his work. For the rest of us, it's another chance to appreciate the interpretive artistry of the pianist who was called "The Last Romantic." He was a towering figure in an age of towering figures and his playing was always a little larger than life. Today's international network of conservatories has produced many concert pianists whose technical proficiency surpasses Horowitz, but the intangible feeling he brought to the music's expressive possibilities, and his sense for its place in the scheme of human emotion and history, isn't so easily taught.
