Fischer Quotes
I heard Edwin Fischer, who did not mean much to me. I heard another pianist in Berlin who had a big success and I thought he was awful - Mischa Levitzki. Just fingers, and you cannot listen only to fingers. There is a difference between artist and artisan. Levitzki was an artisan. But Ignaz Friedman, who I admired, was a great artist. He had wonderful fingers and a very personal, individual way of playing, even if some of his ideas were very strange to me. He had no hesitation touching up the music. I got annoyed with him at one concert when he changed the basses in Chopin's F minor Ballade. I didn't like that. For some reason he was happier making records than he was on the stage.
Vladimir Horowitz
Edwin Fischer was, on the concert platform, a short, leonine, resilient figure, whose every fiber seemed to vibrate with elemental musical power. Wildness and gentleness were never far from each other in his piano-playing, and demonic outbursts would magically give way to inner peace. It was as little trouble to him (as Alfred Polgar once said of an actor) to lose himself as to find himself.
His playing of slow movements was full of an unselfconsciousness beside which the music-making of others, famous names included, seemed academic or insincere. With Fischer, one was in more immediate contact with the music: there was no curtain before the soul when he communicated with the audience. One other musician, Furtwangler, conveyed to the same degree this sensation of music not being played, but rather happening by itself.
Alfred Brendel
Our difficulties with the Russians increased, but I never really blamed Konev. He obviously was merely carrying out instructions. He even had a sense of humor about it occasionally. Once when we were discussing Austrian politics, the name of the Communist party leader, Ernst Fischer, was mentioned. Jokingly, I said: "Well, I don't like him because he is a Communist." Konev grunted. "That's fine," he said. "I don't like him either because he's an Austrian Communist."
Mark W. Clark
Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as "McCarthyist” anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that "eminent historians” like Romila Thapar, R. S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought. During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as "saffronization” was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a "coup d'état”. And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost, the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin "at least as ruthless as Hitler.”.
Koenraad Elst
Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.
Jerry Saltz
I obtained scientific guidance and stimulation mainly through personal mathematical contacts in Erlangen and in Göttingen. Above all I am indebted to Mr. E. Fischer from whom I received the decisive impulse to study abstract algebra from an arithmetical viewpoint, and this remained the governing idea for all my later work.
Emmy Noether
Nepotism. My brother's son, André Fischer, was the drummer in the band Rufus, with Chaka Khan. Apparently, the arrangements I made for their early records were appreciated, so in the following years I was hired almost exclusively by black artists. I am surprised that my arrangements are now considered one of the prerequisites for a hit album. People feel that they make a song sound almost classical.
Clare Fischer
Bill and I were pretty much the same age bracket, and strangely enough, we both went through the same influences, starting with Nat Cole, going into Bud Powell during the bebop period, and then getting into the Lennie Tristano school orienta-in my particular case, Lee Konitz more than Lennie. I mean, in an era when everybody else was playing funky piano, we... I suppose, in a general category, that made us both the same. Whereby [sic] to my mind, we were both radically different. But after I put out that first album, the reviews started off by saying, "Clare Fischer owes much to Bill Evans." And then, when I would write an album, they would say "Clare Fischer owes much to Gil Evans." And I would call that my Evans brothers syndrome.
Clare Fischer
