I think the version you posted was better than the one on Spotify. Sounds like the Spotify-version is a remastered recording where they have killed a lot of the dynamics(even though the youtube-recording is much more distorted it doesn't sound as flat, making it more alive and engaging). Thanks for posting that, I really like it a lot.

One thing that really stands out to me with Luganky's playing is that I can really feel the struggle and triumph. It's perhaps not as sensitive, for a lack of a better word, or refined as others, but more simple and straighforward(ok, please take the word "simple" the right way here ).

Another one I find very interesting is Benno Moiseiwitsch's playing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJw2m0YuEaw

There's something ruthlessly unyielding about the way he moves the song forward.

My favorite interpretation of this song, by Nicolai Lugansky:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhLDse5R8dQ

I've heard quite a few versions of it but this, to me, stands out as the best of them all. I'm not sure what it is about. If I was a musician maybe I would be able to explain it better. Perhaps it's the dynamic, the timing and the fury he brings out of it. In many versions i've heard the left hand seems to drown out the other notes, and the tempo(or rubato) seems to break the music from flowing. Lugansky's playing seems just right.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

For those of you who use Spotify, here are a couple of different versions I think are very good:


Tatyana Nikolayeva
http://open.spotify.com/track/1lulrNNZpMe7Q2Uovq1XNO

Idil Biret
http://open.spotify.com/track/7Aojid13yeHRzBD48TWG4r

Yet another example, but from a long time ago – in G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), in which a fake professor goes up against a "real" one, a celebrated "German nihilist:"

<<"I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis,
and working within this definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could not even understand myself. 'I don't fancy,' he said, 'that you could have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since there inheres in it the introduction of lacuna, which are an essential of differentiation.' I replied quite scornfully, 'You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe.' It is unnecessary for me to say that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit. 'I see,' he sneered, 'you prevail like the false pig in Aesop.' 'And you fail,' I answered, smiling, 'like the hedgehog in Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no hedgehog in Montaigne? 'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your beard.' I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, 'Like the Pantheist's boots,' at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory.">>

It was quite delightful and if Ignaz Brull's other works are similar I hope they regain popularity after such a long time of being lost, stolen and or forgotten.

Thank you, Brian, for this. I love it.

Wafa Interview (3:26)

The price this woman pays for trying to warn the West would break most. (It's heartbreaking and terrifying to hear her claim that she has an easier time reaching people in the ME than reaching Americans.)