The sounds torture
him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes them
dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes
which set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound,
listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away
from us visibly into that unholy company.
Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied
than he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty,
requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he
cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he
played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded.
On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our
time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked,
and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which only
the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of other
players.
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