Lisa Yui Discusses Artur Schnabel on Morning Irsay (WBAI-FM July 2016)

Pianist Lisa Yui discusses Artur Schnabel's recording of Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 5 Op. 10 No. 1 in C Minor with James Irsay on Morning Irsay on WBAI-FM. (from July 15, 2016)

[johnrichardson]

It is so refreshing to listen to an intelligent, warm, insightful and humanity-based discussion of the unsurpassed Artur Schnabel. Schabel's playing is, for me, immediately distinguished by its humanity (as Lisa says) and its VITALITY - its being a living, breathing organism. Unlike the Kempff and Backhaus performances heard here, Schnabel is not at all plod, plod, plod and rather mechanistic: he is LIFE itself.

Of course the other supreme quality of Schnabel was his spiritual profundity: NO ONE has ever played Beethoven's slow movements and especially his last piano sonata, Opus 111, with as much mystical and spiritual penetration and intensity as Schnabel; when listening to Schnabel's transcendental performances of Opus 111 (1930s and 1942), we feel in the final Movement that we are ascending in spirit into Heaven itself and leaving our physical body, our temporary vehicle upon earth, below us. Schnabel was clearly a sound-mystic - and no other pianist that I know of can equal him in his profound penetration of mysterious, exalted spiritual realms (perhaps only Cortot comes pretty close).

I studied many decades ago in London under Professor Ilse Graham, who knew Schnabel very well when her brother - Kurt Appelbaum - studied under Schnabel in Berlin in the early 1930s. Ilse used to say to me that with Schnabel one always felt that 'he had a special line UP THERE' - an intuitive connection to the Divine - and I think that just about sums up his musical and sonic-mystical uniqueness and genius.