An Enduring Pianist?

I know full well that the readership for the articles on my Examiner.com national site are far more modest than those on the San Francisco site. Nevertheless, I like to check the numbers periodically for both sites on Google Analytics to see just what articles (if any) are attracting attention. I was therefore pleased to see that last month's piece about Pina Napolitano's new CD of the complete piano music of Arnold Schoenberg had made a relatively good standing in the "top ten" articles on the national site over a one-month window ending today. However, I was also a bit perplexed to see that Napolitano's number was practically the same as that for HJ Lim's recording of the complete (at least in her opinion) piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, a piece I wrote in July of 2012! I wrote that piece because there was a fair amount of buzz about that recording, encouraged in part by EMI putting the whole eight-CD set on iTunes for download for the whopping price of $9.99. I tried to be fair in writing about the collection, but it was clear that my personal feelings were far from positive.

Even more interesting is that Lim always seems to be there whenever I do a spot check. My guess is that curiosity about her endures and that there always seem to be curious readers guided (perhaps by a Google search) to my article. It may also be that there is always a steady stream of people looking to buy one Beethoven piano sonata or another, and I see that the Lim set is still available in its entirety on iTunes for $9.99. However, since people probably think twice before downloading eight CDs of music, they figure they should check things out before initiating that download. Thus, for better or worse, Lim has become the source for at least a modest trickle of readers to my cite, whether she likes what I wrote about her or not!