Two piano music with Earl Wild

From Ian Hominick's recent biography of Earl Wild, p.285

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I don't want this post to descend into the Querelle des Bouffons ("Quarrel of the Comic Actors"), a controversy of in Paris the 1750s concerning the relative merits of French and Italian opera, with those favouring French opera in the King's corner, and those favouring Italian opera in the Queen's corner.

Nor do I wish to stir up the Querelle des Lullystes et des Ramistes - a famous musical controversy in Paris following the 1733 premiere of Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Hippolyte et Aricie. The Lullistes defended the traditional, elegant French operatic style of Jean-Baptiste Lully and criticised Rameau's harmonies as overly complex, while the Ramistes championed Rameau's rich innovations and expressive orchestration.

(I am most definitely a Ramiste, by the way!)

But there is another side to this story...

'Jorge told me about this plan in the second half of the 1970s. He could not understand why RCA would like to bring two different pianists of greatly differing nature to perform together on the RCA label. The only profitable party could be the recording company itself. Jorge mentioned to me that the meeting he had with Earl Wild and RCA was rather strange. He told me that Wild showed up in funny clothes that looked like a Japanese kimono. Jorge also mentioned that the talking between the involved parties turned rather strange, such that nobody involved believed from the beginning that it would be a success.

'Later in the 1990s I had some meetings with Earl Wild when he came to Holland for the Liszt competition in Utrecht. I also attended a masterclass in Utrecht. He was always kind and pleasant towards me, but I never told him that I had been good friend of Jorge. During my conversations with Wild it became clear to me that he and Jorge were different pianists separated by a huge cultural background and personality.

So I understood why the RCA project would not have worked out for the pianists.

'Much later I was told by somebody - I can not remember who - that Earl Wild was in the audience when Jorge played the Marx concert in New York (1982).'

Mattheus Smits