Player Piano Concert
By Dan Wilson
Herbert Miller asked of player piano concerts:
> Could anyone with personal experience of such concerts share with us
> what types of numbers etc. were played, what piano was used, how
> well attended was the concert?
I've been peripherally involved with a good few dozen recitals in the UK which have varied from phenomenally successful to thinly attended. I must keep off anecdote which will fill pages without making any points.
But: don't underestimate the customer. Highbrows are not going to come to player concerts unless they promise something exceptional (a "Pupils of Leschetizky" reproducing roll recital in London collared all the top critics and got good notices) but don't assume that ordinary folk won't appreciate a good classical piece with a decent intro.
Put the heavy stuff first. A heavy-duty London recital nearly always has a reproducing element and a pumper element, so it makes sense to have the reproducing part first unless there are two or more instruments on stage at once so you can cut between them.
In the 1970s the PPG managed to get some outstanding reproducing grands from members on stage, but then a couple got damaged at about the time that 88-note and Duo-Art pushups became available, and those have reigned ever since. Sometimes the Duo-Art will break into swing or Gershwin (almost a category on his own) before the end of the first half, to show what can be done in that line. With pushups you get a top-rank piano properly tuned in all the major halls, and in music colleges something somewhat less than that. I once had to tune a Yamaha in a hurry using the key of a car socket set !
No matter how keen you may be on one particular genre of music or roll, resist the temptation to have nothing else. I did a tiny show using a pedal pushup, a good ordinary upright and selected rare rolls of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and James P Johnson (you don't complicate the issue by letting on that these are all modern recuts !), dropping leaflets in local jazz meets a few weeks beforehand.
It turned out that vintage jazz piano nuts are not enough to fill even a row of seats, never mind that the ones that came were fully satisfied. To get a good house, I should have pushed novelty ragtime as well - the great unknown music in Europe, I may say - and got myself a local radio spot.
I've often thought that a bit of good artwork and advertising would make something really good of Lost Nickelodeon Jazz Masters (meaning Jimmy Blythe !) or The Unknown Treasures of Leipzig (the hundreds of superb romantic and salon hand-played performances on Hupfeld/Animatic rolls) -- but I'm not the media type, I suppose. It does help to do a really good poster.
There's an unwritten rule about foot-pumped rolls, too: performers are never as good as they think they are. It's actually very hard work to make a piano "project" in the way hand-playing does, so on the whole it isn't done and the music sounds uncommitted. The player is a fun thing and high criticism is not appropriate for parlour playing but in this one instance we are talking about competing with real pianists for glitz and pizza.
[ Some do it for just the pizza ! ;-) -- Robbie
[ Pizazz, dammit ! Goldarn' spellchecker ! -- Dan
[ If you spelled it "pizzazz" it shouldn't've changed ! -- Robbie
I think the one vital attachment a concert needs is a professional pianist who doesn't like players, to come along to the rehearsal, stand at the back and make savage remarks. And I've never seen one used.
Dan Wilson
[ Dan sent the correction separately for "pizza". Of course, my
[ tired eyeballs had already missed the humor. I spent several
[ minutes searching before I found it in the text above. -- Robbie
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