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Stanislav Knor plays Chopin's Four Scherzos · The Piano Maven with Jed Distler

• 0:07
  This is Jed Disler, and welcome to The Piano
• 0:11
  Maven, your friendly podcast guide to piano recordings.
• 0:14
  I want to thank all of you for your patience
• 0:16
  these past weeks while we've been airing rebroadcasts
• 0:21
  of past episodes devoted to Chopin's music. And
• 0:26
  I did this... partly because we had been focusing
• 0:30
  on this composer in October as a parallel to
• 0:34
  the Warsaw Chopin Competition, where, as some
• 0:38
  of you may know, I was Gramophone Magazine's
• 0:41
  official blogger, as well as a co -host for some
• 0:45
  of the intermission features, and also for creating
• 0:49
  daily video reports at the request of the Chopin
• 0:53
  Institute. Whether or not I continue with these
• 0:57
  video Chopin reports depends on a number of factors.
• 1:01
  I've also been encouraged to transform the Piano
• 1:05
  Maven into a video podcast from an audio podcast,
• 1:09
  and that's very much a possibility. Anyway, I
• 1:13
  was on tour for nearly two and a half months.
• 1:16
  I was in London for a month playing concerts.
• 1:21
  I was teaching and both performing in Helsinki
• 1:24
  and Espoo in Finland. And then I had three and
• 1:28
  a half weeks in Warsaw with the Chopin competition.
• 1:31
  And I barely saw the city. I was basically just
• 1:34
  going from my hotel room to the concert hall.
• 1:37
  And finally, I was in Italy where I taught in
• 1:41
  Modena. And then I played a concert at the Teatro
• 1:45
  Nicolini in Florence. Anyway, I am back in the
• 1:50
  U .S. in my New York studio. And, of course,
• 1:55
  I've been procrastinating because I've had a
• 1:58
  lot of work coming back home. And the way I procrastinate
• 2:02
  is usually I tool around the Internet Archive
• 2:05
  website looking for free goodies that might be
• 2:10
  of interest for the Piano Maven. I happened to
• 2:15
  see a recording of all four Chopin scherzos,
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  and it was a recording I never knew about before,
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  and it featured a pianist whom I had never heard
• 2:25
  of before. This pianist's name is Stanislav Noor.
• 2:30
  That's K -N -O -R. This was a release on the
• 2:36
  Superfund label that came out around 1961. And
• 2:40
  someone uploaded a not quite pristine vinyl transfer
• 2:45
  of this LP with the four scherzos. And I've also
• 2:50
  found it on YouTube in a much better sounding
• 2:54
  transfer, so you can decide. which one you want.
• 2:57
  If you can download from YouTube, that's fine,
• 3:00
  or you can check out the Internet Archive link,
• 3:03
  whatever you prefer. Anyway, I've listened to
• 3:06
  it, and I've provided links to both the YouTube
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  and to the Internet Archive download in my episode
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  description. Stanislav Knorr was born in Prague
• 3:21
  on February 14th, 1929, according to Wikipedia,
• 3:26
  which is always right. Isn't that correct? And
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  he died in Sweden on December 4th, 1984. And
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  this pianist studied with Frantisek Maksian in
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  his native Czechoslovakia at the Prague Academy.
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  And he also studied with Marcel Chiampi in Paris.
• 3:51
  Yeah, Marcel Chiampi, yeah. His performance on
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  this disc of the first scherzo is not one of
• 4:00
  those fast and fire -eating interpretations.
• 4:04
  I like the interpretation because there's a very
• 4:06
  strong left -hand presence with lots of attention
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  to syncopated accents. And there are some very
• 4:13
  broad rhetorical touches. And he plays the central
• 4:17
  trio section based on that song, Sleep My Jesus,
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  in a very direct manner without milking the music
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  in anguish like so many of these young competition
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  hot shots. And you know who you are. The second
• 4:32
  scherzo... is also very meticulous in detail,
• 4:36
  with rhythmic values very clearly spelled out.
• 4:40
  But the tempo kind of bogs down in the second
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  subject, you know, the D -flat major. I can't
• 4:51
  remember what it is now. It's too early in the
• 4:53
  morning. But basically the music just kind of
• 4:56
  drags. And then the energy picks up toward the
• 5:00
  end of the trio section at the climax. That's
• 5:04
  good, you know, but it's, you know, too little
• 5:07
  too late. Generally, I think in this performance,
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  you hear more of a teacher than a pianist at
• 5:13
  the piano bench. Stanislav Noor, however, does
• 5:17
  pretty well in the third scherzo. It's by no
• 5:21
  means a demonic whirlwind of a performance a
• 5:25
  la Martha Argerich. But this pianist particularly
• 5:29
  comes to life in the trio and how he balances
• 5:32
  that chorale -like theme. And the decorative
• 5:38
  responses. You know what I'm talking about. find
• 5:48
  the performance very interesting, and there's
• 5:51
  a lot of careful scaling of dynamics. And also,
• 5:54
  this pianist takes care, again, to bring out
• 5:57
  left -hand accents that one usually doesn't hear.
• 6:01
  But the fourth scherzo, as is often the case
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  in this piece, proves to be the weak link, and
• 6:10
  that's because of Stanislav Knorr's rhetoric.
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  innervated tempo and rambling phrasing in the
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  trio section, which just seems to go on forever
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  in this performance. But he plays the outer sections
• 6:24
  of the scherzo well, but without any real scintillation
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  or bite. I mean, don't expect Vladimir Ashkenazi
• 6:32
  or Yevgeny Kissin or the classic Vladimir Horowitz
• 6:38
  recording. or that performance that I heard during
• 6:42
  the Chopin competition by William Yang. Now that
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  was quite an amazing fourth scherzo, and you
• 6:49
  should look that performance up. I do hope in
• 6:54
  the future, however, to have a podcast episode
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  about Stanislav Noor and his 1962 recording of
• 7:02
  the Gershwin Concerto with Vaclav Neumann conducting
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  the Prague Symphony Orchestra. This recording's
• 7:09
  actually been relatively available on CD, and
• 7:13
  you can find it on various digital platforms.
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  I was thinking it might be interesting to do
• 7:19
  an episode about the Gershwin Concerto and Rhapsody
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  in Blue in recordings made behind the Iron Curtain.
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  So I think I'll save the Stanislav Noor -Václav
• 7:31
  Neumann Gershwin Concerto for another time. But
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  I would check out Stanislav Noor's Chopin Scherzos,
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  mainly for Scherzo No. 1 and Scherzo No. 3. The
• 7:44
  other two, meh, you don't really need to hear
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  them. This is Jed Disler, and you've been listening
• 7:50
  to The Piano Maven, your friendly podcast guide
• 7:53
  to piano recordings, and I look forward to being
• 7:57
  with you for our next episode. Take good care
• 8:00
  and be well. Thank you.