Hoffman

Hoffman

Josef Hofmann, male, born in 1876 in Krakow, Poland, pianist, died in 1957. Josef Hofmann, who toured Europe at the age of 17, made a splash in 1887 when he premiered in the United States at the Metropolitan Opera House. After returning to Europe, he stayed in Berlin for further study. In 1892, he joined Anton Rubinstein to study. He thought it was the most important thing in his life to follow this famous teacher. In 1894, he returned to the stage with mature skills, and his performance was a great success in Europe, Russia, South America and the United States. Rachmaninoff even dedicated the third piano concerto to him.

In 1926, he became the dean of the Cotes Conservatory of music and taught until 1938. In 1940, he began to limit the number of concerts and held the last concert of his career in New York in 1948. Although he was the first musician to record records, he didn't leave many records. At the peak of his career, he is considered to be the greatest romantic pianist. In his relatively limited repertoire, he is praised for his absolutely balanced description and wide dynamic performance.

Oscar Wilde is the first person to observe the fact that "there is no more boring than perfection". However, as a pianist, Hoffman is almost perfect rather than boring. Just like the perfect violinist Yasha Hafez, Hoffman achieves this artistic realm without any loss of communication ability or creativity. If there is any pianist in this century To be called "perfect," he may be the main candidate for the honor. At his best, Hoffman has a fascinating piano sound, excellent mastery of piano loudness and possibilities, amazing memory, perfect sound sense and imagination that permeates all his performances. But the most important thing is that he has a pure, natural and cheerful character in his lifetime dedication and brilliant performance. About Hoffman's listening to his friend play his new music adapted from Strauss's bat (one of the most abundant and complex masterpieces on the piano, as the music critic Harold xunberg called it), Hoffman visited again a week later and played the whole adaptation to godowski. Rosina Levine talked about a time when Hoffman listened to her husband Joseph play a Liszt adaptation "Lorelei" that Hoffman had never heard of before. Later that day, it was used as encore for the concert.

Schoenberg believes that as a pianist, "Hoffman plays in a way that combines classical pure competition with romantic elegance.". He has all the skills of gordovsky, but he is more colorful and emotional. His style combines noble music lines, eternal song like timbre, and from the most ethereal extremely weak tone to the sudden outbreak of turbulent vast dynamic (his performance) does not have the extreme egoism of Bachman and other celebrities, nor does it have Rosenthal's fiery and powerful skills (although Hoffman's skills are equally excellent and better controlled). Perhaps only his best friend Rachmaninoff does not have Hoffman's poetry, color and vitality. "

Hoffman's style of piano playing is different from those in the early 20th century. Even though Hoffman and Rachmaninoff are often regarded as extremely romantic performers today, they (and feruzio Busoni) are actually the pioneers of modern style. Although they use a greater degree of freedom in phrasing and elastic speed than most modern pianists, their performance is still faithful to the original model; for them, the printed score is the ultimate guiding principle to shape an interpretation. Some people have quoted Hoffman as saying: "the real interpretation of a piece of music comes from rigorous and exact interpretation, and the latter only depends on rigorous and exact interpretation. Arbitrarily adding tone adjustment, light and shadow changes, special effects, etc. to deliberately show off and exaggerate the performer himself is equivalent to distorting and changing, at best just a grandstanding person. In his book "immortal pianist" written by xunberg, the performer must always be convinced that Hoffman always practices himself: "although his performance is full of high z-by, poetic and personal style, he is accurate and breathless in the original score."

In the book "piano playing" published in 1908, he mentioned: "fifty years ago, skill was everything, and the art of piano playing was the art of playing speed - an art of how to perform the largest number of notes in the shortest possible time. Of course, there are still some outstanding masters, such as Rubinstein who regards skill as secondary to connotation, Chopin of Liszt, but the public are awed by skill or dazzle; we find that the trend is slowly flowing to simple style. What is required is no longer the dazzling skills that deviate from aesthetics, but the combination of high aesthetic feeling and appropriate skills. "

Hoffman's father, Casimir, is a professor of piano, acoustics and composition at Huashao Conservatory of music. He is also the conductor of Huage theater. His mother is a singer. He started playing the piano at the age of four and immediately showed his talent. After just a year of classes, he began to perform in public; at the Warsaw Opera House premiere, his legs seemed too short to form a step, so his father sat on his left side and stamped on him. At the age of seven, he played to Anton Rubinstein, who commented, "I don't believe in any prodigy, but I believe this one is." At first, his father tried to limit the number of public performances of Joseph Fang, but when he was nine years old, he agreed to let him participate in a European return performance, which caused a sensation everywhere the child went on the tour; no God could cause the same impact until the appearance of young Manuel decades later. In 1887, at the age of 11, Hoffman made his first tour in the United States, which caused considerable excitement. During the middle of his first concert, the audience rushed to the ticket office frantically to buy tickets for his next concert.

Joseph played more than 50 concerts in 10 weeks before the society for the prevention of child abuse noticed and claimed that his father was exploiting his children. The next concert had to be cancelled because of the public anger. Fortunately, an anonymous sponsor gave us $50000 to cassimeer on the condition that Joseph had to leave the stage until he was 18 years old. Cassimeer accepted the donation, and the father and son returned to Europe and settled in Berlin. It was here that 16-year-old Hoffman became Rubinstein's only entrance disciple. Hoffman describes these courses: "Rubinstein is not easy to be impulsive and moody. He is often crazy about one concept today and more interested in another the next day. But in his art, he is always logical and clear, and although he wants to seek explanations from different points of view, he always gets to the point. He never asked me to play any work more than once in a course, explaining that this was because he might forget what he taught me last time in the next course and confuse me with another way of saying it again. "

He returned to the music stage in Hamburg in 1894, and since then he has been touring until the 1940s. He became an American citizen in 1926 and took over the Curtis Conservatory of music in Philadelphia in the same year. His body and palm are not big (Steinway company has specially made a piano for him, and its keys are "cut off a certain inch" in Schoenberg's words, so that he can play comfortably), and there is no stiff face or body behavior when playing.

Record a record

I don't like recording. Compared with the length and breadth of his career, his studio works are quite few. These works mainly include some short pieces, showing his delicate side; in addition, there are a few large works, Liszt's Rhapsody No.2 and Chopin's humorous music in B minor, both of which have been cut and destroyed. This collection includes the published and studio legacy, starting with the recordings he left behind by the sound machine and Typewriter Company (some of the reel recordings he made for Edison during his first U.S. tour have now been lost), and then the cooperative recording with Columbia company for six years in 1921, which form the main part of this album.

Finally, there are a series of records recorded for Brunswick company in 1923, which constitute his final studio recordings, most of which are included in the. The remaining recordings include experimental electrical recordings for RCA and HMV, and live or radio recordings of some side recordings of concerts, including the legendary American 50th anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall in 1937.

Listening to gramophone and typewriter, Columbia and Brunswick's records, his control over the lines of music, his ability to give flesh and blood to his works in personal expression, his soft fingers and the scope of his concept are all clear. Though unable to faithfully convey all of his amazing power, which xunberg called "the combination of perfection, refinement, fortitude, energy and poetry that will accompany him to his grave," these recordings still provide extensive evidence that Hoffman has always stood firm.

Personal life

Hoffman is a teacher, writer, composer, inventor (with about 70 patents, ranging from shock absorbers to steam cars), linguist, tennis player and wrestler

Chinese PinYin : Huo Fu Man