Not for the first time on disc, I enjoyed Horowitz in the studio here more than on the concert platform, and most of all in the B flat minor Sonata. This is a performance of infinite poise as well as passion, with a funeral march as inexorable as it is visionary, and with as eerily atmospheric a finale as you could ever hope to hear from these legendary fingers. The C sharp minor Etude in its turn has a searing inner intensity achieved without idiosyncratic point-making, and the C sharp minor Mazurka is scarcely less impressive for its potent yet uncapriciously savoured detail.
The piano also sounds rounder and warmer in the studio than at Carnegie Hall (with its coughers), where Horowitz himself at times struck me as slightly less relaxed, not always so willing to let the music speak for itself. In the Polonaise-Fantaisie his nervous tension results in some loss of finesse in heightened excitement. Nor, in reflective lyricism, has his line the same smooth shapeliness heard in the sonata. But in the F sharp minor Polonaise he is very much the keyboard wizard of old exulting in feats like those breath-taking streamlined flights of featherweight uprising octaves.'