Three Pianists - One Piano Piece - Three Renditions

Johannes Brahms' Intermezzo, Opus 118, No. 2 is new to me.  It is available on Youtube, played by Arthur Jussen, Evegny Kissin (starting at 2:01), Ivo Pogorelić and others.  I listened to the piece played by each pianist in the order listed.  After hearing Ivo Pogorelić's rendition, I ended my search for others that played the same piece.  In my mind, it was perfect. 

What to me appears perfect may be far from it to another.  Differences in subjectivity give rise to variety and "variety," as the saying goes, "is the spice of life."  The universe is about variety and variety is the work of God.  With variety comes choice and each person is given the Free Will to choose.

While there is but one path to God, man is able to choose freely its hues, shape and distance.  The more passionately colorful, the more tortuously shaped the path, the longer is the journey.  The length of one's journey to God is not measured in distance and time but in relative degrees of difficulty.  The more difficult the journey, the longer it seems to be in the mind of the traveler.

A composer of music expresses on paper his journey of twists and turns leading to God; a pianist lifts those dexterous fingers up and hammers them down on the keys of the piano, turning notes into sounds, and sounds into emotions.  Depending on the piano playing skills of the pianist, and on the depth and range of emotions the pianist is willing to give each note and caesura, performances of the same piano piece by different pianists will vary.

The genius of Ivo Pogorelić was his ability to lift the musical notes off a music sheet, study each note individually and together in clusters and translate them into sounds that paint wide ranging emotional depths, crisscrossing a vast musical canvas that form a consolidated path shared by the composer and the performer, one that is as intricate as it is unique and that leads steadfastly toward Heaven. [1]


[1] Another one of Pogorelić's brilliant performances was Beethoven's Sonate für Klavier (c-moll) Op. 111.  It can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKk-nntXrn4 .  The way Pogorelić played it, especially the Arietta beginning at 11:31, was exquisite.  If the second movement of Beethoven's piano sonata in C minor is a description of a section of the composer's path to God, then it is most certainly tortuous, intricate and difficult to navigate through, showing wide-ranging choices of the composer whose genius was fully captured by Ivo Pogorelić.