The wildly revisionist recordings of American pianist Tzimon Barto (born Johnny Smith) provide the mainstream classical piano repertory with a salutary jolt. Whether he's playing Rameau, Ravel, or now a group of keyboard sonatas of Haydn, he revels in ultra-detailed readings (Barto marks up scores with interpretive directions at the micro level and refuses to perform from memory) with extreme dynamic contrasts, carefully controlled gradations of dynamics and articulation, and an overall willingness to place the dictates of ...
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The wildly revisionist recordings of American pianist Tzimon Barto (born Johnny Smith) provide the mainstream classical piano repertory with a salutary jolt. Whether he's playing Rameau, Ravel, or now a group of keyboard sonatas of Haydn, he revels in ultra-detailed readings (Barto marks up scores with interpretive directions at the micro level and refuses to perform from memory) with extreme dynamic contrasts, carefully controlled gradations of dynamics and articulation, and an overall willingness to place the dictates of expression above any concept of authentic performance or even fealty to what's in the score. Barto, who has added bodybuilding, command of eight languages, composition of several thousand poems he plans to engrave on stone slabs, and a bout with crack cocaine addiction to an impressive résumé, might be considered a somewhat less Romantic-oriented and less overtly flamboyant relative of Ivo Pogorelich, but his music-making is no less extreme. The Haydn sonatas here make the listener...
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