Re: Gershwin CD and others
By Philippe Rouillé
These whole discussion about the value of CD recording piano rolls seems to me very valuable, because we are actually discussing music, and not only technical matters. And mechanical music should not be music played mechanically, but live music played by mechanical means. That is why the term mechanical is ambiguous, as well as automatic, actually .
I was told by a French collector that, in the old days, some people used the French expression: "Musique a la mecanique" which means: music played with a mechanical system.
Jergen Hocker, the president of the German society, wrote a very interesting long article upon automatic pianos, listing and reviewing (with a very strong personal point of view) some of the 66 CD recording piano rolls he mentions in the discography annexed to his article. It was published (in German) in a magazine called Klassische Musik, Fono Forum, Mai 1995, pp 26-37. Alas, it would be a huge task to translate it in english or in French ...
For myself, I do think the best CD of that kind are the Ampico recordings of Rachamninov (3 CD, one of Rachamninov playing his works, another of Rachmaninov playing works others than his, and the third one with Rachmaninov and some other pianists, Lhevine, etc.), realized by Norman Evans/Denis Hall on a specially rebuilt Estonia grand piano with the Ampico system (published by Decca Historic).
As for the Condon collection (32 CD), I have about 12 or them (mainly classical). They are usually good, sometimes very good, but I am angry at the lack of information of the leaflets inside: impossible to know on which system (Duo-Art ? Ampico ? Welte ?) were made the recordings, no number of the rolls, no precisions on the works played, etc. I would like very much to know the reasons for this lack of information, as Dennis Condon is a member of this list, and I know he knows a lot about reproducing pianos. But probably he is not responsible of the editing in Europe of these CDs by Bellaphon.
Best regards,
Philippe Rouille (Paris, France)
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(Message sent Thu 17 Oct 1996, 19:10:26 GMT, from time zone GMT+0200.) |
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