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In 'The Last Romantic' documentary Horowitz doesn't play any repeats of the K. 330 Mozart sonata, leaving about an 8 minute shorter sonata. I was just wondering, is this 'not correct'? Was he only doing it for the sake of the time or is there actually some sort of acceptability towards this? It's like Horowitz is saying "Screw the repeats, you've already heard it. On to the next!". It's not like I have anything against what he's doing (I actually think it sounds better without the repeats). But anyhow, is this acceptable in formal situations?

While the general correctness of this is beyond my league, I'd say the fact that he is Horowitz and he was over 80 makes it completely fine.

(Or in any situations): Depends on who you ask.
(Sorry, whom you ask.)

Most 'pedagogues' would probably say no.
I say, whatever. IMO the performer should make whatever choice he feels is best, and we'll appreciate and judge it on its own terms. IMO the worst is when someone takes repeats but doesn't show any reason for having taken the repeats. I certainly don't want to hear it just "repeated." Nor do I want to hear it again just LOUDER.

BTW I think most audience members are usually thinking, "Please God, no repeats."
Anywhere, any time, except with select performers.

I'm talking about pieces like sonatas, but not about something like (for example) the Brahms-Handel Variations. There are some pieces that would sound ridiculous to almost any knowledgeable listener without the repeats. That's one of them. And in sonatas there are some repeats which IMO must be played or else the music sounds woefully incomplete -- e.g. the two little repeats on the next-to-last page of the Appassionata.

BTW in competitions I think the judges pray that the contestants won't take repeats.
Again, with exceptions. Someone once played the Brahms-Handel at the Cliburn amateur competition, without any repeats (because of the time limit), and it was ridiculous.

As to what Horowitz usually did or why he didn't take the repeats there....I don't know, but I'd guess he just didn't believe that much in taking those repeats. I said otherwise about a Rachmaninoff recording of Chopin's 2nd Sonata, because in those days, there were stricter time limits on how long any recording could be so I guessed there was a high chance that Rach was just trying to fit into a time limit.

Nice post! Thanks Mark.

And I think I would have to agree with Horowitz's choice of not playing the repeats. I don't know, maybe it's because that recording is the one I heard first. I've tried listening to the repeats. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Well, it makes sense to me considering he would take steps two at a time when going up and down staircases.

Mark's post was excellent. I'll only add that, typically when a performer chooses to take one repeat over another, it's the first. So, you'll hear many performers take the first repeat, but skip the second (especially in Mozart, where the second repeat occurs at the "end" of the movement). To me, it sounds awkward to repeat the last section, though I'll sometimes take the first repeat. Just depends on how I'm feeling.

There are other performances of Horowitz playing through with the repeats; I just don't have any full performances handy at the moment. I believe, in this clip, he takes the first repeat, but not the second: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd7Q7vhNB-I.

Too often I hear repeats performed when the performer has nothing new to say with them at all. Then it's just boring. If you are going to do repeats, IMO, be sure you've got something different to do with it. Perhaps Horowitz omitted the repeats for this very reason? Who is to say, but personally I'm glad.

Horowitz was always concerned about "boring" his listeners. I think this is one reason his programs, at least after intermission, usually included many short pieces. Perhaps this is the reason he omitted the repeat.

It would be interesting to listen to some of his sonata recordings to see if he did this regularly.

Any time Mozart has fewer repeats, I'm a happy camper.

I've heard a couple of concert pianists justify omitting that Appassionata repeat: that the sense of the inexorable trajectory towards the abyss of the furious coda is lost if the repeat is taken. Sometimes I think they have a point, if the pianist is unable to maintain the momentum and jack up the tension when he plays the repeat.....

But one repeat I feel should never be omitted is that in the first movement of Schubert's D960 - if a composer writes extra music for the repeat, a pianist who doesn't play it hasn't played the complete work. (And let's not protect the guilty: Alfred Brendel and his pupils Paul Lewis, Till Fellner and Imogen Cooper..... ).

I'm pretty sure that's about a different repeat -- i.e. the one just before the ones I'm talking about.

Von Bulow has a particularly silly footnote 'explaining' why that repeat shouldn't be taken.

Tovey -as you probably know- was dead-set against it, and wrote brilliantly (when does he not write brilliantly?) concerning the omission. He talks about not being able to go through the death of a hero twice... (sorry don't have the edition handy). My attitude is more of a meh, the movement IMO is too short without it.

I totally agree. OTH, if one is going to adopt a glacial tempo a la Richter, then I'd just as soon give it a miss.

Yep, my edition is Tovey's (not that I always agree with him....) .

But about that movement's shortness - you can't get much shorter than Chopin's Op.35 finale (1:10 to 1:35, depending how how fast the wind blows over the graves......). And it too is a moto perpetuo, which gives the impression of a time warp (like Einstein predicted, when velocity increases..... ).

Whatever happened to "heavenly length"?

Let me preface this by quoting what Dvorak wrote in a copy of his 8th Symphony: Once and for all, without the repeat!

Of course, when talking about composers of the Classical and Early Romantic era, it's important to remember that they expected performers to introduce some variety into repeated sections, such as embellishments or different tone colors.

As for Horowitz: sometimes he included repeats, sometimes not. This is especially the case with Scarlatti sonatas, where he seemed to leave his decision to the spur of the moment. When Horowitz played Mozart's K. 330 Sonata in Moscow - he included the repeats for the first half of the movement, but not the last half. For his studio recording of Mozart's K. 333, he included all the repeats - but he omitted the repeat for the last section of the 1st movement when he played it in public - both in 1951 and in 1987.

Horowitz omitted the repeat in Schubert's D. 960 Sonata when he performed it live in 1953 - but included it in his 1986 studio recording.

He generally included repeats when performing Beethoven Sonatas - which indicates to me that he felt they served a structural need.

Some repeats simply do not work, imo. For example, there's a repeat in Chopin's B minor Scherzo, Op. 20 which is not often taken - the piece is repetitive enough as it is.

I am not one of those who believes that repeats should always be taken - nor do I believe they should never be taken. It's up to the discretion of the performer. One of the most unpleasant concert experiences I ever endured was hearing Alfred Brendel plod his way through Schumann's Symphonic Etudes including every last repeat - played exactly the same way as the first time through.

For me it's the same as described by Derulux above: often the end of a movement feels like a real conclusion and so it feels very awkward (to me) to repeat from there.

One recent example where I had that issue is the 3rd movement of Haydn's b minor sonata: it ends with a short coda-like statement of the theme in octaves -- impossible to go back from there! Yet, Haydn still wrote a repetition mark.

It seems as though something in how we (or at least many people) perceive this music must have changed quite drastically from the classical age to today (?), otherwise I can't understand why composers whose music I can relate to so much would put repetition marks where I feel no repeat is possible.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Brahms, who was asked why he skipped the repeat when conducting one of his symphonies. He said that when nobody had heard the piece, you had to take the repeat, but now that everyone knows it, it is not necessary.

On the other hand, I heard Yvonne Loriod play Mozart's Rondo alla Turca sonata without a single repeat, and felt like she should have played the other half of the sonata as an encore.

As a short aside to the topic of repeats - even if one chooses to repeat, it's sometimes controversial from where (e.g. the Grave introductions of Beethoven's Pathétique and Chopin's b flat minor sonata).

In Mozart's day, he used repeats because 1) he was writing the music to spec for each performance he did, so it was only natural to want to get more mileage per note written, and 2) most of the audience would never hear the same piece twice anyway, if the repeats were not taken. In fact, Mozart would often be called to play entire movements over. (Encore, after all, means again!) Which is understandable - you couldn't record it, and you would probably never see him again!

Generally, then, it was a convention that was used as a crowd-pleaser more than as a formal standard, and it's open to opinion whether modern audiences would prefer to hear more Mozart, or less. Starting with Beethoven, the repeats started to become less 'optional,' as he structured his works to be played with precisely the repeats he specified, regardless of the audience's proclivities. I would never skip the second repeat of the Presto from Op. 10/2. But there are still plenty of examples throughout the 19th century of composers who used repeats in the same way to familiarize the audience with the music, even if it wasn't completely justified musically.

Sorry, maybe I should have clarified. I understand why they did it.. I just don't like it.