The thread on dream recordings made me think about the old piano rolls. We have a collector here in Sydney who restores and collects reproducing pianos and their rolls. I have actually sat in his living room and heard a ghostly Debussy play the Estampes and some Preludes.

He has embarked on a project to record as many of the rolls as he can on CD. (Some years ago he had a fire at his house and lost a good many rolls.) His name is Dennis Condon- maybe Google knows him.

I've heard the Debussy rolls too. Wonderful.

Although, it's likely that he would never be accepted as a good Debussy interpreter today.

Yes, quite. Of course, I think some of D.C.'s pianos are rather dryer and crisper than Debussy's piano (Erard?- I used to know but I have forgotten)would have been.

Orlando Gibbons, have you heard these rolls on CD or in the flesh?

My teacher, as an eight-year-old prodigy, was sent to Llandaff cathedral as a choirboy, where he had brief lessons with Debussy and Elgar. He said Debussy used to improvise on one idea for ages, annoying everybody within earshot. He was apparently very bad tempered with the choir. My teacher had fond memories of Elgar who took a shine to him because of his improvisation and talked to him about composing. He described Elgar as being more like a kindly farmer than a great composer.

The lessons of my youth were full of similarly wonderful anecdotes, which at the time I thought were just wishful exaggerations of an old man, but I later found out they were all true.

Depending on the system (Ampico, Duo-Art, etc.) that was used to produce the piano rolls, we must remember that the technology of the time, remarkable as it was, gave only an approximation of how the pianist actually played. I would not give too much credence to the fidelity of the interpretation that I hear on piano rolls.

Regards,

I still think they're better than Disklavier.