Great Performers: Guiomar Novaes

Thanks to a government grant, the 14-year-old Novaes enrolled at the Paris Conservatory. Her teacher Isidor Philipp told writer Harold C. Schonberg that he felt Novaes was "by far the best pupil I had nursed to the concert stage." From 1915 onward, Novaes became successfully established on the American concert scene. Although James Gibbons Huneker may have been geographically off when he dubbed Novaes "the Paderewska of the Pampas", he described her pianism with colorful accuracy, writing how "her touch is not only the outcome of a happy confluence of muscular and nervous energies, but is made more viable by the cunning interplay of pedal and a variety of finger, wrist and arm attacks." Novaes performed and toured steadily until her final recital at New York’s Hunter College in 1972.

Piano connoisseurs consider Novaes's acoustic electric RCA Victor 78s from the 1920s as best representative of her artistry. She didn't enter a studio again until her association with Columbia Masterworks between 1940 and 1947. Two years later she embarked on a prolific decade's worth of recording for Vox. After that, nearly nothing, save for a lone LP on American Decca, two Vanguard sessions, and a final release devoted to Brazilian composers for the small Fermata label. One suspects that Novaes approached the recording process with ambivalence. Time limits and session costs held no interest to her in pursuit of the perfect take. Producer Ward Botsford once had difficulty getting Novaes to stop playing at the end of a session. Duke Ellington's band was scheduled next in the studio. Novaes kept going, oblivious to everything. The bandleader arrived, watched for a few minutes, turned to the agonized producer and simply said, "Man, dig this crazy pianist!"

On the other hand, Novaes approved uninterrupted first takes of the entire Schumann Symphonic Etudes, and even admitted that she set down at least one Chopin Nocturne "prima vista" while the tapes rolled. However, her mastery of the Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto's formidable solo part is structurally thoughtful and full of rhythmic backbone, together with her penchant for moment-to-moment changes of color and voicing. A similar "discipline of spontaneity" makes itself felt throughout the Saint-Saëns Caprice on the Air de Ballet from Gluck’s 'Alceste', a lengthy showpiece full of deceptively difficult and cruelly exposed passagework that leaves no room for the smallest smudge or imbalance. The long chains of trills are quite magical in Novaes's hands, giving the impression that someone has exchanged the piano'’s hammers for golden vocal cords supported by the world's healthiest pair of lungs. No wonder that Novaes impressed Debussy, who praised her "power of complete inner concentration which is a characteristic so rare in artists."