What gets into people when they get in front of a computer keyboard? Talk about power corrupting. …And nothing is more powerful than a review.

In the old days you at least had to show some mastery of the field to make comments on the work of other people. These days you don’t have to show any command – of your field….of the language….even of yourself….you just need to hit a button and there, you’ve trashed a year or two of sweat by some poor sod silly enough to want to display his talents to the public.

By all means destroy a book….with another book. Savage your opponent…. with a sardonic lyric. But press a button?

Amazon “trash” reviews – especially by anonymous posters — are the dirty bombs of criticism.

And no – I am not crying over myself. Political writers are used to becoming the target of cyberfury….especially in an election year.

No, my wrath is on behalf of Cyprien Katsaris (one of the living legends of classical piano, if you’ve had the extreme misfortune never to have heard of him). His monumental performance of the Liszt transcription of the Beethoven symphonies is rated only 4 stars by some Amazon customers.

Four stars, dear reader? What were those reviewers withholding that one star for, I wonder?

That’s mass man for you. Never able to look up to anyone or anything. Always leveling. Never able to see anything bigger than his own miserable limits.

Short of raising the dead and making the blind see, Katsaris’s performance is as close to the divine as clods of clay will ever get. The physical stamina demanded alone is mind-boggling, let alone what’s needed technically, intellectually and emotionally.

I assume these critics actually play some instrument besides a kazoo? Having spent many years at the keyboard let me say that the Liszt transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies are some of the most excruciatingly difficult piano pieces there are. Hitting seventy-five percent of the notes would qualify you as a very competent pianist. Hitting every one of them with a level of precision, power, beauty, imagination and depth that would make the archangels stop dead in their tracks and take notes is a feat of which few…very few….maybe no more than a score of mortals…. have ever been capable in the life of this sorry planet. Katsaris is one of them.

Amazon does not have enough stars to rate that performance. The proper response to it is not button- pushing but chastened silence.

If you can find words, they had better be the best you can summon up.

Thus, my first Amazon review:

One of the finest recordings I have ever heard, February 15, 2008

Katsaris is simply incredible. He has virtuosity and power to spare – that goes without saying. He plays this extraordinarily difficult score as though he were born doing it; as though he had an orchestra in his ten fingers. I can’t think of many other pianists who could pull out every voice so individually from this complex arrangement and bring to each one such a range of color.

Add to this a majestic singing line, commanding intellectual presence, a tone quality that is sumptuous, relentless rhythmic power, and technical panache that never detracts from the musical depths that open from under his fingers. The slow movements spin out into galactic space, the filigree passages are iridescent, the fast movements are volcanic dithyrambs driven by centaurs.

What a genius. And what a genius Liszt was to make you almost think the unthinkable – that these transcriptions of Beethoven improve on the originals. Music written by one titan, recreated by another, and brought to life by a third.

Encountering this recording was one of the musical high points of my life. I cannot imagine piano playing any better than this. At least not on earth.