i feel sick

[pianistimo]

1/2 a bag of giant jellies (assorted flavors).  arrggh.  is a doctor in the house?

[pianolist]

You ate them all?

[pianistimo]

yes.  give me cortot masterclass cd, somebody.  maybe if i concentrate on something.

ps actually i started on the bag three days ago.  i couldn't wait until today - not even sharing this bag.  all of a sudden it is of no interest to me.  except i just ate one more.

[pianolist]

I'm just off to bed, so I'll try to cure you by thought transference. Maybe this little piccy will help.

[pianistimo]

in an odd sort of way - this really made my day!  thanks!  sweet dreams!

*he always had such a piercing stare.  i think he was mostly genius - but also, a very good teacher, right!  that's a good combination.   

[pianolist]

I have a friend who was one of Cortot's last pupils. There are a number of recorded piano rolls of the solo parts from concertos, and Cortot recorded the César Franck Symphonic Variations in this way. In 1995 we put on a concert in which Cortot played the solo part, and my friend accompanied him on another piano. It was a bit stagey, but actually quite moving in a way, to think that his former pupil was paying homage across the years.

My friend told me about the Saint-Saëns Etude en forme de valse, and apparently Cortot was adamant that it should be played in some particularly difficult way, without cheating, but at a concert later he played it and used exactly the cheating type of fingering that he had forbidden my friend to do! Part of what we call genius is actually showmanship, and having the commonsense and wit to be naughty on occasions. We have too many serious piano competitions these days!

Hope you're still alive.

R

[henrah]

In 1995 we put on a concert in which Cortot played the solo part, and my friend accompanied him on another piano.

Was Cortot's part being played on a self-playing piano, i.e. there were two pianos on stage and one of them didn't have a human at the helm? That must have been really creepy, I can imagine some people hallucinating Cortot playing at the piano!

[wishful thinker]

No, Mr Pianolist was at the helm, yes?

[pianolist]

This type of performance is known as a reproducing piano concerto in the trade. It usually means that a reproducing piano, which is fully automatic, is cajoled into playing with live orchestra. There have been quite a few of these concerts over the years, beginning (as far as I have traced) in 1917, when Harold Bauer played the Saint-Saëns G minor with the New York Symphony Orchestra, at Aeolian Hall on 42nd Street, NYC. The real Harold Bauer was in Chicago at the time, no doubt having carefully arranged to be there in order to afford the maximum publicity to the Aeolian Company.

In the UK, I organised Percy Grainger to perform the Grieg with orchestra back in 1972, and he has repeated the feat several times over the years, most memorably at the Last Night of the Proms in 1988.

But the Cortot performance took place at the Purcell Room, and our Pianola Institute can't afford symphony orchestras, nor indeed fit them on to the Purcell Room stage, so we plumped for our good friend, Guthrie Luke, who studied with Cortot when he was a young man. We had two pianos, I think a 'D' and a 'B', if I remember correctly, with Cortot on the 'D'.

In such situations, the roll proceeds at its own pace, and it is up to the conductor or live pianist to accommpany sensitively. But there are inevitably orchestral tuttis in which the piano keeps stumm, and so the roll automatically stops at these points, and someone has to bring it in again on cue. If we do this with orchestra, then one of us hides somewhere in the first violins, with a remote control button to press as necessary. At the Purcell Room, there was really nowhere to hide, because I have to be able to see the roll, so I simply sat at Cortot's piano, rather like a page turner.

Now there are occasions when I play concertos with pianola, which is a different matter entirely. Normal pianola rolls are not recorded by anyone, since they are just transcriptions of the sheet music. In these circumstances, it is I who am the soloist, bending the music roll to my ideas of dynamics and phrasing, just as a pianist would do with the sheet music. The pianola can be thought of as a related instrument to the piano, with its own set of challenges. You have to grip the roll by its throat, and force it to the speeds and rubatos you want, otherwise there is always a tendency to meet its potential inexorability halfway, and to dissipate the effects you want to achieve. Also, any pianist playing with other musicians will tend to use eye contact, especially at the most critical moments of synchronisation. With the pianola, these critical moments are the ones when you can least afford to move your eyes away from the roll for even a fraction of a second, so you end up using body movements to communicate instead, and you have to watch conductors with peripheral vision. I like clear conductors whose down beat means exactly that to the orchestra.

On the whole, I don't get nervous for myself, in that I have done a lot of concerts over the years, and in general I know I can carry them off. But I do get nerves on account of the mechanisms. There are always several people involved in the player piano side of our concerts, but if you are the only one of them on stage (as I was at the Proms), and you know how many delicate chain drives and pneumatic motors there are inside the instrument casing, all of which could just possibly fail, it can make you feel just a little bit sick.

Without the aid of jelly babies!

[henrah]

Haha, great return to the topic Pianolist, and wonderful account of your experiences!

[pianistimo]

i survived last night.  am again eating a jelly fruit candy.  will probably crash at 3 pm.  must get daughter to school right now.  interesting read - all this about piano concertos of famous pianists on reproducing pianos or pianolas.  guess that i am ready to hear one of these concerts whenever things work out. 

i just applied for a sweepstakes to pay my entire student loan off.  if you have any loans (anybody) with American Education Services (through Wachovia) - type in 'youcandealwithit.com' for the 20,000 sweepstakes.  it never hurts to apply, right?!  loans can make you feel sick, too.

say, one of my piano profs in college way back when - prof. jean-paul billaud, also studied with cortot!  excellent teacher to my way of looking at things - but very VERY much a romantic.  i'm sort of inbetween.  a 'tweener.'  (he really gave us a lot of help on what it means to be a 'performer' and how to achieve goals -as well as great piano lessons).