Yesterday evening’s live-streamed offering on the Ross McKee Foundation YouTube channel was a Piano Talk program by Mark Ainley, author of the Facebook group The Piano Files with Mark Ainley. The title of his talk was An Introduction to Historical Piano Recordings; and much of the talk was organized around listening to such recordings, all of which were made between 1927 and 1953. As with previous McKee offerings, the video of that program has now been uploaded and has its own Web page.
Because the entire program lasted a little less than 45 minutes, which included a generous amount of background information provided by Ainley, all of the recordings he discussed were represented by relatively brief excerpts. Most importantly, however, Ainley made the point that music, as such, does not reside primarily on the printed documents of score pages. The music only resides in how it is performed, and performance is not as strictly defined as any marks on paper.
Thus, very early in his presentation, Ainley selected a familiar excerpt from Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 9 set of nocturnes, playing recordings of a portion of the second of those nocturnes in the key of E-flat major performed by Sergei Rachmaninoff (recorded in 1927), Josef Hoffman (recorded in 1937), and Raoul Koczalski (recorded in 1938). This affirmed a point that has come up many times on this site, which is that my primary objective is to account for the experience of listening; and listening is tightly coupled to the act of performance, rather than documents of notation. Performance, in turn, resides just as much (if not more so) in what the performer chooses to do as in the marks on the score pages that (s)he is interpreting.
By the time Ainley had concluded his talk, he had presented viewers with samples from eight different pianists. One would have to do a bit of biographical research to discover that each of these pianists had his/her own personal blend of personality traits. Performance thus has egotism as one of its foundational stones. The music may be by Chopin, but the performance involves the disclosure of a distinct personality reflecting on Chopin through acts of interpretation.
That said, performance in a concert setting will always outweigh any recorded document. Ainsley did not devote much time to discussing what actually happens when a recording is produced, and that process has gone through many transformations reflecting changes in the underlying technology. Many of today’s recordings amount to syntheses based on editing processes that bring together excerpts from many different recording sessions. Those techniques are less evident in earlier recordings, simply because the technology was not yet there to apply them. However, the absence of editing had its own problems, such as making sure that the pianist played fast enough for the content to fit on the record.
Nevertheless, Ainsley was definitely correct in assuming that the best way to introduce listeners to the legacy of recordings is to provide examples for listening. Most important was that, aside from those multiple interpretations of the same Chopin nocturne, there was prodigious diversity in the content presented during the rest of his presentation. Indeed, listening to Marcelle Meyer play music by both Jean-Philippe Rameau and Maurice Ravel (with whom she studied) made for an absorbing scope of repertoire. Furthermore, the Ravel selection was taken from the “Ondine” movement of Gaspard de la nuit, one of the more technically demanding selections that Ainsley chose to program.
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