ARTICLES
MY FATHER, SIMON BARERE - Continued
"Father
was a strange man. At the piano he was like a computer that could
remember and duplicate anything. With the exception of a few
troublesome phrases here and there, I don’t remember him ever having a
memory slip. He rarely practiced some works in his repertoire. I lived
with him for 31 years and heard only a few passages of Liszt’s
Gnomereigen, the Don Juan Fantasy, and Balakirev’s Islamey; yet I heard
him practice the Chopin sonatas, the Schumann Toccata, as well as
Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata."
Boris Barere says
the period in the early 1930s was difficult when the family lived in
Berlin. Simon Barere’s recital of 1932 had created a sensation, but he
lost over 60 concerts in Germany because he was Jewish. "Although he
was to go to America the trip did not happen because his manager in
England died, and there were financial repercussions from the stock
market crash in the United States. After the family left Russia, the
timing was always off; he did not know or understand the business
aspects of a career, and for years he never had a good manager. When he
needed work, a friend who was in charge of UFA Films found a job for my
father in Hamburg playing Liszt’s Rhapsody #6 and La Campanella
everyday in a silent movie theater to raise money to send my mother and
me to Sweden. "My father was depressed and sick when the family
emigrated to Sweden; he did not touch the piano for over a year.
Somehow he received an invitation to perform with Sir Thomas Beecham
and to record for HMV in London. I could never understand how this was
possible because he did not practice for over a year."
One
of the recordings was Liszt’s La leggierezza, a piece he had learned as
a student of Anna Essipova, the second wife of Theodor Leschetizky.
"She taught to my father, and to Benno Moiseiwitsch, a different ending
for the etude than Liszt’s. My father recorded the work with the
Leschetizky ending. It was a phenomenal recording but he never played
it like that again because the press criticized him for it.
"My
father’s debut at Carnegie Hall in 1936 included two Bach chorales (the
Bach-Busoni arrangments), the Liszt B Minor Sonata, Chopin’s Nocturne
in Db and Scherzo in C# Minor, two Scriabin etudes, Balakirev’s
Islamey, and Blumenfeld’s Etude for the Left Hand Alone."
Simon
Barere made recordings for HMV between 1934 and 1936, as well as others
that show his pianistic genius. He recorded at Carnegie Hall, but it
was impossible to see the stage from the recording studio to know when
a new work started. "My father was a victim of this; his Carnegie
Hall recording of the Chopin Ballade #4 has some 18 measures missing;
it was an excellent performance, minus the opening. "Because my father
did not make a great number of recordings, I decided to speak to the
technicians who ran the Carnegie Hall recording studio, offering to pay
for whatever they could record when my father played there. They had to
juggle acetates from one turntable to another because it was impossible
to see the stage, so they missed many works. I wanted to have
recordings of my father for myself, my family, and friends, so I
duplicated them to pass around. Some years later Brian Crimp of APR
Records contacted me and asked for recordings of my father, which were
subsequently released by APR and Hyperion labels." Barere played the
Schuman Toccata at breathtaking speed, not because he liked it at that
tempo or tried to show off. It was a necessity; in those days there
were no tapes and no editing. "When my father suggested recording the
Schumann Toccata to HMV producers in 1934, they complained the work was
impossible to record on one side of a 78 r.p.m. record. Lhévinne had
recorded it on two sides of a 78 r.p.m., 10" record and so did
Horowitz. My father bet he could do it on one side, and he did it twice
in a row for them. I couldn’t imagine what he later told me: ‘Would you
believe that my hands got tired?’ He did not like the feeling.
"Once
he replaced Rubinstein in New York on short notice in 1946. The family
was on holiday when a telephone caller from the Brooklyn Academy
announced that Rubinstein’s wife was ill in California and he had
cancelled. Could my father replace him? Sure. When? Next week. He
hadn’t been at the piano for two months but took the train to New York
and practiced the C major scale four or five times that day. I remember
the program was the Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, Beethoven’s
Appassionata Sonata, Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy, and Balakirev’s Islamey."
Barere
preferred Romantic repertoire and often played the Chopin Impromptu in
Ab, but with a fast pace in the beginning, then doubling the tempo at
the repeat. Some people objected to that. Simon Barere’s fateful
performance of the Grieg Concerto in Carnegie Hall took place in 1951.
"He was happy about that engagement because he had a new manager and
new help for his career. He practiced the Grieg Concerto, which he
never played before; as a matter of fact my mother and I played the
orchestral part to help him get ready for the performance. I was
backstage when it happened. His last words to Eugene Ormandy were very
strange: "Mr. Ormandy, this is the first time that we are playing
together. I hope it won’t be the last." A few minutes later he died on
stage during the performance.
Like many artists,
Barere did not like to hear his own recordings, and expected a lot of
himself. "If you spoke to such musicians as Heifetz, Piatigorsky, Misha
Elman, Shura Cherkassky, or Horowitz, they all had a one-track mind;
they thought only of their craft and did not know if it was spring or
summer. When my father returned from a tour I would ask him where he
had been. It was not important to him to know where he was or where he
was performing.
"He had no backing as most artists
had and did everything himself. Milstein, Piatigorsky, Rubinstein, and
Horowitz had sponsors. My father never owned a piano throughout his
life. "It was easy for my father to play the piano. He puzzled people
because he did not have to work at it like most others. He played with
a ravishing sound, and his performances had a magical quality. His
natural intuition distinguished him from other pianists. He often said
pianists should leave the music alone and not overly interpret it,
because this risks destroying the music."
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Listen to Samples
The
life and career of Simon Barere is illuminated in an
audio interview with his son, Boris Barere, conducted by
impresario and piano expert Jacques Leiser.
The result: a wealth
of information about Barere as well as first hand recollections and
anecdotes of the greatest musicians of the time who knew him and
visited him at Barere's homes. This is no sentimental family memoir it
is a deeply informative, highly colorful and uncommonly entertaining
cameo of a unique figure in piano history as well as some of the most
famous piano legends in memory. Interspersed are some of Simon Barere's
most extraordinary recordings both from the studio and privately
taken in the concert hall, made available by the APR company that has
reissued on CD all known audio documents of Barere.
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