who's the cheater i hear about?

[pianohopper]

My piano teacher was telling me about this story about a pianist, but he refused to disclose the guy's name so as not to bad-mouth him directly.  Anyway, the guy had a record contract, and came in to record this concerto (also unsure which concerto it was).  Only problem -- he didn't know his part.  So, instead of recording it in the normal sense of the word, they recorded it MEASURE BY MEASURE.  Then the tech guys pasted it together and made it sound fluent. 

Who is this guy?  Anybody know?  And what was the concerto?

[Bob]

Sounds like a Glenn Gould thing with the recording.  I really don't know though.  I have heard of slicing and dicing recordings before but not with piano.  I don't think it's "ethical" somehow.  It could be a good way to get closer to perfection, but it's not really what you can actually play then.

[contrapunctus]

Sounds like a Glenn Gould thing with the recording.  I really don't know though.  I have heard of slicing and dicing recordings before but not with piano.  I don't think it's "ethical" somehow.  It could be a good way to get closer to perfection, but it's not really what you can actually play then.

Gould never did measure by measure. He would record two-three minute segments of music. A lot of the peices he recorded only had parts that long. Otherwise, he would find a suitable break to stop at.

[mmccarthy]

Right, Gould didn't do his cuts measure by measure. He did splice, just not that much. He said he didn't like the "one-takeness" of live performances. To hear his last recording sessions (among other fun recordings - the Strauss Burleske is particularly funny), go to https://www.collectionscanada.ca/glenngould/m23-700-e.html. The segments that he takes definitely aren't measure by measure. As a side note, I also remember reading that for Bach he needed much fewer takes than for other composers.

I read once (here, I think) that Pollini recorded the Chopin etudes measure by measure. I doubt that this is true, though.

Rosen wrote that it takes a good pianist to make a good recording, regardless of splicing. When splicing it's easy to produce a segmented recording that doesn't make sense as a whole. In particular, strange tone/tempo variations are hard to avoid when focusing on little segments at a time. I tend to agree with him, in general - as long as the music is good, I'm happy with it.

[rc]

Wow, if that's true give all the royalties to the engineers who would've been the ones who actually made the music... That's amazing!