As another example of why we shouldn't rush to judgment:

Here is a 1928 Duo-Art piano roll recording on a Chickering grand of two Chopin etudes by a young pianist just arrived in America and trying to establish his reputation. The recordings are note perfect, so they have that going for them, and I find them satisfying overall, but it is possible in the first etude (10/6) to ask, What's the Tempo? The pianist is all over the place, speeding up and slowing down, and even in the second etude 25/12 (the Ocean etude), he slows down dramatically in two sections. In the first etude the pianist uses a slight breaking of hands in order to accent the tenderness of the melody at key moments. I suppose this could be forgiven in the 1920s. The performance overall could be criticized as highly self-indulgent playing. Even Paderewski in his dotage could play the Revolutionary Etude in a recognizable tempo.

The pianist is identified as a young Russian emigre, V. Horowitz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-OPTYpYuS8&feature=related

I think there is a difference between a great humanitarian and a great pianist. Most would agree P was the former, but I'm not at all convinced he was the latter.

Also, I think there are a lot of degrees between being all about perfection and tons of wrong notes. For some being all about perfection would be phrased more like thinking a world class pianist should have the technique to play the correct notes most of the time. I cannot think of any pianist whose recordings seem to have as much technical failings as these by Paderewski. I do think that earlier in his career P must have played with a better technique and Dubal indicates that is the case.

Thank you wr, Numerian, pianoloverus. That was interesting!

wr, I agree that "sensibility" is not easy to talk about because it is not easy to define. And then, if one can manage a satisfactory definition, one has to qualify every point...

BDB, regarding the development of the instrument, I did the gruelling work of finding a paragraph on the Steinway website that said that Steinway earned a patent for the "concert grand" in 1875. I wonder how long it took to populate stages with them after that? I bet there's a book out there somewhere...

I not sure that recording, if it represents accurately the way Horowitz played the first etude, is representative of the way he played most of the time even early in his career. I know on a Horowitz recording(The Early Years?)the rhythm throughout is very steady and extremely modern in concept. I have also listened to quite a few historical Youtube recordings by other pianists and few take the rhythmic liberties shown in some of the P recordings.

Paris: 18
Colorado: 21
Chopin/Warsaw: I think 25

Also, there are some competitions I'm not familiar with (Russia, London, I think there's one in Vienna) that might have lower age limits too -- I just don't know about them.

Awesome, thanks.

That's true. And it is interesting, too, to think about what our impressions of various other famous pianists would be if we only had recordings made from the latter part of their lives, and they were all unedited. I dare say that the general opinion of pianists as diverse as Rubinstein, Horowitz, Ashkenazy, and de Larrocha would be quite different than it is if all we had were raw recordings made late in their careers.

But regardless, I can still hear some of Paderewski's striking musical imagination and genius in the recordings he did leave. I remember hearing his recording of Chopin's op. 26, no. 2 polonaise many years ago and thinking "Oh, so THAT is what the fuss was all about." The poetic intensity and musical authority of it just bowled me over.

The "problem" with Duo-Art (and Ampico) piano rolls is that the speed of reproduction can be changed by considerable amounts, both faster and slower. I don't recall, since it's been several years since I've handled such equipment, if some of the rolls have indicated on them the actual tempo of the performance when it was recorded. Otherwise, one sets the tempo that best suits the listener which may not at all have been that of the performance.

Regards,

.....but presumably the presence of tempo changes is retained, no matter what -- unless the playback speed isn't constant.

That's a really good question. From what I have read, the three most famous brands of piano roll (Welte-Mignon, Duo-Art, and Ampico) all indicated the recording/playback speed at the beginning of each roll. Welte-Mignon also manufactured test rolls that included a series of notes played exactly a second apart from each other, and some notes and chords played at a wide variety of dynamic levels, for engineers to be sure that the playback instrument was set up correctly and optimally. These test rolls were used when recording the famous Mahler Plays Mahler CD, so we can be sure that the composer really did record Ging heut' morgens übers Feld in under 3 minutes! I don't know if the other manufacturers did the same or not. With a couple of landmark CDs, Gershwin's super-fast Duo-Art recording of Rhapsody in Blue, and Rachmaninoff's Ampico recordings that usually closely match the timings of his electric recordings, the reproducing pianos were adjusted and tested by technicians of impressive credentials. However, where we know little to nothing about the circumstances under which piano roll recordings were played back and recorded, sometimes decades ago, I think it's worth wondering whether the overall tempo is accurate.

@Mark_C: I'd like to think that internal tempo differences would always be faithful, but apparently there was some magical doo-hickey inside these machines that compensated for the changing diameter of the roll of paper over time so that the recording didn't gradually speed up, and I guess if the doo-hickey isn't adjusted correctly before playback, that could be a problem?

Sure. But I would guess (guess) that we could pretty much tell if it's only that, or what the player was really doing -- provided it's someone real good (rather than someone who might just have been playing sort of randomly), because even if they did weird stuff, it would usually make some sense.

I would think there might be a spot or two where we wouldn't be that sure, but if it's a bunch of places, that we'd feel we pretty much knew if these changes were real or not.

Something that would compromise our ability to know, besides not being able to judge for sure what the player might have plausibly done, is that the doing of such rhythmic things is somewhat dependent on the exact nature of the piano -- things like tone, sustaining power, balance among the registers, which absolutely aren't retained for the recording (even if it were the same piano!); and on the basic tempo of the playing, which isn't necessarily being retained.

But I'd still bet a quarter that I could tell.

P.S. I got curious enough to go and listen to those etudes played by Horowitz, especially to see if the tempo stuff seemed to be 'real' or an artifact of the playback.


I would bet my bippy that the tempo shifts (which BTW wouldn't have struck me as such) are authentic -- nothing to do with inconstant playback speed.

BTW, Numerian: I think the breaking-of-the-hands is something that Horowitz continued doing throughout his career. For sure he did it at least intermittently thereafter, and I think a lot of the time. He did it in his "historic return" concert (1965); for example, his extraordinary Chopin C# minor mazurka (30/4) from that concert has lots and lots of it.


While I'm sure it can happen that tempo shifts are due to the technological thing that was mentioned, I would bet two bippies and five strings of poloponies that the tempo stuff we're hearing in this is pure authentic Horowitz. Take it to the bank.

There are so many, many ways we can tell this.

-- It fits totally with what we know of Horowitz's style. (And BTW, as with the above thing, I don't find this particularly different from what he did later on; it's not just a thing of youth or that decade or whatever. Sure, there were some stretches of time where he didn't do such stuff as much -- but also stretches where he did.)

-- The tempo shifts come at places that are completely logical -- places that are absolutely where someone with such a tendency might well do it. (Can say more about this if anyone wants me to.)

-- The tempo shifts are done together with other things to make it "work." This wouldn't occur if they were random artificial technological glitches.

I don't think the extreme rubato Horowitz uses in the Chopin Op.10 #6 is at all typical of many or even any of his recordings that I have heard, and I think I've heard most of them.

The occasional breaking of hands in Horowitz's playing of Chopin Op.33 #4 is also nothing like the breaking of hands(or arpeggiating the RH octave?)that Paderewski does in vitually every measure in the first movement of the Beethoven.

You misread it.


(Anyway I hope you realize I didn't intend any comparison to the Paderewski; it was only about early Horowitz vs. later Horowitz, as per what I was replying to in Numerian's post.)

Just for you, Mark:

Another 1928 recording, this time of Chopin's Barcarolle performed by Artur Rubinstein for HMV records. Rubinstein said the Barcarolle established his reputation in the 1920s as a first-rate concert artist. His conception is unique to him, and the muscularity of the performance astounded audiences, especially if they were used to the refined and delicate French school of playing Chopin (ala Cortot). Like Horowitz, he uses enormous tempo rubato, but in a more judicious way; it's like his tempo changes themselves are timed to give a rocking, barcarolle rhythm to the performance. It's really quite something, and this says nothing of the impulsive moments that give directness to his performance and which never overstep into brashness. The tone is typical Rubinstein - rounded, full, noble, always rich with color (he attributed this to having exceptionally fleshy fingertips and a fifth finger as thick as most people's thumbs). His only rival in this approach to Chopin at the time was Arthur Friedheim.

This will send you to the piano to play the Barcarolle again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5G_8JHbEck

Thanks, Num! (It's OK to say Num, right?)

I think I've heard that recording before; I know I've heard one from around then and it was at least similar. I do love this, as well as his later versions that I've heard.

He sure mixes it up here. On another thread we were talking about his performance of a Brahms Intermezzo. Some people thought it was unusual for him that he shifted the moods so much. I thought it was almost typical, and this performance is in line with that.

One of the challenges of this piece (one of the many) is which possible moods to be in, how to do them, and how to mix them if we choose to do so. And I think for many of us, it's particularly hard to be in touch with how well we're conveying what we think we are. I don't think I've known of any other piece where our ideas of what we're doing can be so far off from what's actually coming out.

I see no particular reason to buy into Dubal's point of view regarding Paderewski. Much of it is opinion pretending to be fact, a mode we are all familiar with here at PW (and this sentence is an example of it).

I just can't get any enjoyment out of it with such sound quality.

I just mistyped the Opus number. My comments about that performance still apply.


Numerian was using the performance of Op. 10 No.6 by Horowitz to say that other pianists played with the extreme rubato that Padereswki showed in the OP's post. My claim was that, based on the Horowitz recordings I have heard, the amount of rubato Horowitz used on that recording was not typical of most of his recordings and that the the amount of playing the LH before the RH in H's performance of the Chopin Mazurka was also much less compared to what Paderewski did on the first movement of the Beethoven.

Not at all regarding the thing I said about it.

The "breaking of the hands" in that mazurka -- particularly the more unusual thing of playing the right hand FIRST, which was a particular Horowitz thing -- for better or worse is hardly equaled by anyone from any period, ever.

I have no problem with your differing opinions. The main reason I ever comment on them is that you sometimes think you're saying something about what I've said but you really aren't.

It's true that H plays the right hand before the left in that Mazurka. So if I change my post to "breaking if the hands" as opposed to "playing LH before the right" then my comments apply. My main point being that the amount of breaking of the hands is much less than in the P video.