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Old 07-06-2022, 05:39 PM   #29 (permalink)
Ayn Marx
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Originally Posted by jadis View Post
The vast majority of the finest piano recordings available to us are reproduced and transferred very imperfectly, there's a lot of flutter and hiss. I have a Soviet recording of Gilels playing the Symphonic Etudes that is in D minor rather than in C sharp, as Schumann wrote and as Gilels played. There's audience cough etc. And yet it contains playing that makes impeccably recorded modern day interpretations very dull by comparison. Same with most recordings by Cortot or Gieseking or Schnabel or Arrau or Edwin Fischer, people who were not only singular artists but polymaths bathed in the tradition, who studied with Liszt's and Clara Schumann's students. There are qualities there that could never be reproduced by the gifted careerists of today, who all sounds exactly the same.

As Feltsman says here (between 1min and 2.30), it's nobody's fault but it's a different art form today.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WwW...ssicalEnsemble
I take your point but wonder if you understand what it feels like for someone suffering ‘perfect pitch’ ? Try running your fingernails over sandpaper and you may get the idea. (Sometimes I even have trouble if I listen to a piece performed in mean temperament when I’ve been listening to one performed in equal temperament.) These speed variations can be ‘cured’ by running pieces through an autotune device but that throws the baby out with the bathwater in bleaching subtle dynamic expression.

As to today’s pianists, yes, they’re mostly a dull lot specialising in demonstrating how fast they can play. The Chinese are the worst at this game. Lucky for me there's a local piano teacher, once a small time concert pianist, who gives intimate little recitals on her Bosendorfer Grand. To my ears these make Yamaha’s & Steinways sound dull. Elizabeth Schwarzkopf refused to be accompanied by Bosendorfers claiming “They out-sing me”.

Last edited by Ayn Marx; 07-06-2022 at 06:03 PM.
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