One of the pianists whom I wanted to hear most after reading Harold C Schonberg’s tome ‘The Great Pianists’ was Josef Hofmann. Schonberg clearly idolized him and wrote about him in such detail that I couldn’t quite imagine what he sounded like. Sure enough, once I did hear his playing, I realized that this was indeed something very different from the norm – there was no one like this at all on the concert stage at the time I was introduced to him (in the mid-80s), While Horowitz was known as a Romantic master, he too seemed almost ordinary…while Horowitz created amazing sounds and lightning bolts, Hofmann seemed to be an alchemist who produced liquid gold.

The legendary concert that Schonberg wrote about – Hofmann’s Golden Jubilee performance of November 28, 1937 at the Metropolitan in New York – was one that I excitedly got my hands on, and I could not believe some of the playing. Perhaps one of the greatest parts of the concert is his performance of Rachmaninoff’s famous G Minor Prelude Op.23 No.5. The middle section finds Hofmann voicing a third voice in such a way that it seems to float and jump out of nowhere. The similarity between the writing of this work and that of the famous Third Piano Concerto brings to mind how incredible Hofmann’s performance of that work might have been – Rachmaninoff wrote the work with him in mind, and Hofmann never played it. The loss is ours. But the 3-minute dream of this performance of the G Minor Prelude can fill the imagination with how splendid that interpretation might have been…