2022: My Year of Nicolas Horvath Recordings

Readers that have been visiting this site for some time probably know that I follow up on my “Month-by-Month Memories” of performances with a less-structured “Memorable Recordings” article. However, this was the year in which Fate led me to take a “deep dive” into the recordings made by pianist Nicolas Horvath. At the beginning of this year, Horvath was no stranger to me. In 2021 I had written in March about the album of his performances of music by Alvin Lucier, followed by an “‘Unknown’ Debussy” article in October;” and, in April of this year, I wrote an article entitled “Horvath Begins Project to Record Tailleferre.”

Nevertheless, I was not prepared for what would happen shortly thereafter. I received electronic mail from Horvath informing me of the albums he had released under his own Nicolas Horvath Discoveries label. Most ambitious was his project to record the complete piano works of Jean Catoire, amounting to 30 hours of music divided across a series of eight volumes. These were to be released through Bandcamp, whose Web page for the first release described Catoire as “the very first (and totally forgotten & neglected) french [sic] minimalist composer.” I wrote my first article about Catoire on July 26, and my account of the final volume appeared on August 25.

For the remainder of this year, I did my best to catch up on other Discoveries releases. Every now and then, I would encounter albums with familiar content. This was the case where John Cage was concerned, as was Hans Otte, whose Das Buch der Klänge (the book of sounds) had been known to me through the album he recorded of his own performance in 1982. My most recent article, which appeared a little more than two weeks ago, involved another “Long-Duration Release” (three hours and 22 minutes), this time of The Chord Catalogue by Tom Johnson.

Visiting Horvath’s Bandcamp page is a sobering reminder that I shall never be able to keep up with all of his recording activities. Since he is based in Paris, I also doubt that I shall have an opportunity to experience one of his concert performances. Nevertheless, I owe much to the Nicolas Horvath Discoveries releases for their impact on how I continue to reflect on both the experience of listening and the attempt to document that experience with text as pretty much my only resource.