How can the (London) Player Piano Group (PPG) celebrate the Pianola
Centenary in 1999 when it was launched in 1897 ?

Answer: Great Britain remained in the Dark Ages until November 1899,
when the Pianola went on sale at the offices of George Wight, the
Aeolian Company's London agent, in Bond Street, West (as they'd've
said then).  Also, it takes two years of arguing before you achieve an
agreed outcome.  (This true of both the Player Piano Group and Friends
of the Pianola Institute.)

Never mind.  It made good sense to roll the Centenary celebration into
one for the PPG's 40th Anniversary as well.  The combined gravity
proved enough to get the PPG's President Peter Katin out of his shell
and not only attend (which he has done more than once in the past), but
he gave a short recital, too.

The venue was Sutton House, believed to be London's oldest surviving
house, with part of the foundations going back to Saxon times in the
900s.  It's now in the care of the National Trust, who let it out for
functions such as this.  In fact the jollities had to be split into
two rooms, but the PPG were plainly prepared to trade this off for the
chance to employ the piano in the hall.

This is a little-used 17-year-old Steinway concert grand, evidently
obtained in its original shipping case from nearby Hackney Town Hall,
where the prevailing Labour administration regarded it distastefully
as a toy of the elite.  (The cultural proclivities of the far left are
quite unpredictable.  The Soviets loved piano music and had two piano
factories providing very respectable concert grands for their public
halls.  Was it that Steinway is American ?  Hackney could have bought
an Estonia -- and a lot cheaper, too !)

Activities started in the early afternoon of Saturday May 8th with
an illustrated (in both visual and aural senses) critical talk by
Robin Cherry, using hi-fi recordings both of his own and from the BBC
archives, touching on interesting elements of the reproducing piano
story.

In my early years in the PPG (ten years after its founding) I heard
plenty of disappointing Welte-Mignons; but for Welte, Robin stuck to
recordings of Norman Evans's red-paper Steinway-Welte grand which was
laboriously transported to the Purcell Room (No 3 concert hall of the
Festival Hall complex) in the 1970s for a commemorative recital of
Leschetizky pupils and recorded by Robin there.  It was magnificent,
making Welte rolls sound as good as Ampico, if not better.

Outstanding were comparative recordings of Grieg playing his own
"Butterfly" in 1903 on disc and 1904 on roll -- the treatment identical
(you do not mention the truly dreadful Duo-Art version, cooked up from
a Metrostyle roll, in the same breath) -- and one of Leschtizky's few
own Welte rolls, his own lushly lyrical and poetic "Deux Allouettes".

Robin wondered why it was so difficult to distinguish different pian-
ists in the same piece on both disc and roll, whereas differences were
much plainer listening live.  Here his example on disc was Percy
Grainger and A N Other playing Grainger's "Molly On The Shore" on disc,
and Katharine Goodson playing a Schubert Impromptu on disc and
(recording of) Duo-Art roll.

Then followed a Duo-Art recital of the committee's favourite rolls,
played on the Steinway with Peter Davis's impeccable converted Pianola
pushup.  The dreaded Pianola worm-virus struck as this was being
adjusted into position, with one of the bronze worms on the leg-raising
gear stripping with a bang, a common failure.  A borrowed copy of
London Yellow Pages under one end, opened to a carefully selected page,
made good.  Paddy Handscome wittily compered and Julian Dyer was the
roll servant.  Here's the menu for you:

  098   Bach - Overture to Cantata No 28 in D, pl Leff Pouishnoff
 6658  Paradies - Toccata in A, pl Myra Hess
 6453  Chopin - Etudes Op 25/9 and 10/5, pl Guiomar Novaes
 ----  Schubert - Impromptu Op 90/? (the one mentioned earlier) --
       added to the programme for interest
 6636  Liszt - Benediction of God in Solitude, pl Alexander Siloti
 7250  Bizet/Horowitz - Carmen Variations, pl Vladimir Horowitz
 5763  Granados - The Lady & The Nightingale, pl composer
 6774  Prokoviev - Scherzo, Op 12/10, pl composer
 D577  Ireland - Amberley Wild Brooks, pl composer
 6072  Grainger - Gay But Wistful, pl composer
 0352  Dohnanyi - Rhapsody Op 11/1, pl Frank Lafitte
 encore - Gaertner - Waltz No 1, pl Ignaz Friedman

The pushup was set for concert hall acoustic, making all these pieces
absolutely convincing except for Goodson's Schubert Impromptu which,
while inoffensive, lacked the limpidity of both the Cherry recordings
heard earlier.

Graham Kent of the Player Piano Association of South Wales and the West
then gave a short talk entitled "The Duo-Art of The Future ?" in which
he outlined, and showed a working model of, a windlass electric drive
for a piano key, where a solenoid provides the trigger and the windlass
the degree of power required.  His description appeared to suggest a
single drive for all windlasses, where Duo-Art replication would
require two very nimble drives, and MIDI replay a separate windlass
motor for each key.  The model was beautifully crafted and suggested
that this would be a very durable mechanism provided the right drive
filament was chosen.

The PPG's AGM, which was formal and commendably short, prefaced Peter
Katin's recital:-

 Scarlatti - Sonata in D minor, Kk9
             Sonata in E major, Kk380
             Sonata in C major, Kk159
 Chopin -    Nocturne in D flat major, Op 27/2
             Ballade No 3, Op 47
 Rachmaninov - Prelude in G sharp minor Op 32
               Prelude in G major, Op 32
               Prelude in B flat major, Op 23

Katin's playing always strikes me as slightly too good-mannered, not to
say too much of a good example -- a fault (for me) shared with Alfred
Brendel.  Maybe my tastes are coarse, thrilling to the outrageous be-
haviour of the Cziffras and Horowitzes.  However, on this occasion he
was a shade off form, all three Rachmaninov pieces containing harmonies
unfamiliar to me.  Nonetheless for a top-rank pianist of his calibre to
recognise the PPG at all was a great privilege and our applause persu-
aded him to emerge once more and play a less taxing Chopin waltz.

Listening to Katin intently, I reflected on Robin Cherry's unanswered
question about live/recording distinctions, and concluded that heard
up close, pianists indulge in strictly irrational dynamics which are
missed when listening to discs and on rolls, either not picked up by
editors or maybe even edited out as flaws.  These are not great enough
to disturb the drama of the story but convey an individuality the
slightly blander recording lacks.  Goodson's Schubert Impromptu, in
both roll and recorded roll form, completely lacked a powerful manner-
ism heard on the disc where she repeatedly inserted sharp crescendos
not on the page.

That concluded the more musical part of the day, leaving everyone to
eat a very good meal prepared by the restaurant, and half of them to be
entertained by self and Julian Dyer using my own 65/88n pushup on the
Steinway with unimproving pieces from American film, vaudeville and
bordello and British seaside tea garden.

After this, there was a very good toast to the PPG by John Farmer, who
recalled that at its start there were several companies in London still
vestigially in the player piano business which soon folded, giving PPG
members a chance to secure archive and technical material they might
never have had otherwise.  Gerald Stonehill's famous Duo-Art collection
was founded on the Harrods lending library stock, which he bought
entire when it closed down.

Prof. Roger Buckley, a chairman during the PPG's early years, responded
with interesting reminiscence.  I was glad that, in addition to the
better known pioneers Frank Holland (of the Musical Museum) and Gordon
Iles (of Artona Music Rolls), he mentioned Rex Lawson and Denis Hall
who are rowing the Pianola Institute boat these days, Cyril Granger (no
"i"), Fritz Lang who learnt pianola playing from the Aeolian Co's chief
demonstrator in Berlin, Alfred Reiss, and Reg Best, whose scatological
contributions to the PPG Bulletin I, like Roger, had as Bulletin editor
to trim, to his intense annoyance.

Reg invented the eccentric "Percy Pushup" as a fictitious PPG member
at whose social meetings, if you required personal easement, you were
directed to the large beds of nettles surrounding the house.  Reg never
visited my house but anyone who has seen old Bulletins and does, must
be struck by an unidentifiable sense of deja-vu.

A great occasion, which we -- a record number of PPG members, around
100, almost a third of the membership -- shall all remember with
pleasure.

Dan Wilson, London