The well-known music publisher held onto manual engraving into the late 1990s when computers finally got good enough. Now the trend is to replace paper altogether with screens. Here are lookbacks to the bygone craft.
Category Archives: Classical music
Engulfed Keyboard: Freire and Richter play Debussy
I’m relearning ‘Canope,’ one of Debussy’s amateur friendly Preludes that stretches hands all over the 88s and reading skills across three staves. One day I hope to don the scuba gear and visit ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’. Here are Nelson Freire and Sviatoslav Richter wrapping their very differently-sized flippers around it.
Heinrich Neuhaus documentary
An engrossing biography of the man who taught Richter, Gilels, Lupu, and whose Art of Piano Playing is known to expert and duffer alike.
Happy Halloween from Berlioz and Liszt
Pianist Eric Ferrand-N’Kaoua has a ball with Symphonie Fantastique.
Give me that Vieuxtemps religion: Good enough for him
Itzhak Perlman and a very young Cho-Liang Lin talk staccato. The excerpt is from the Vieuxtemps 5th violin conerto.
From Christopher Nupen‘s documentary Itzhak Perlman, Virtuoso Violinist (I know I played every note)
Colla sinistra: Wittgenstein plays Ravel
Paul, older brother of philosopher Ludwig, lost an arm in WW1 and then commissioned composers to write left-hand only pieces for him. By all accounts a temperamental character, he torqued several now-great names while simultaneously enriching the repertoire through his sponsorships.
Melissa Lesnie‘s article “The Man with the Golden Arm” is fascinating reading.
Here is Wittgenstein at the keyboard with Bruno Walter and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.
The Waldstein: A tutorial
It all sounds so simple. Just press the keys in the right order and there you have it. Erik Reischl shows how it is done.
Next stop, Volodos: Evan Le plays Rondo Alla Turca
Through a pointer from Slippedisc: 5 year old Torrance-born Evan Le plays a Mozart favorite.
Extrapolating his progress, he’ll probably be playing this arrangement in a year or so!
What the Puck?: Schnittke on Shakespeare
(K)ein Sommernachstraum… I enjoyed it in 2005 with the LA Phil and Jurowski and recalled it just now for no particular reason. Starts off calm and optimistic, peaks in discord, and fades away. Reminds me of something, can’t quite place it.
Here’s the BUTI Young Artist Orchestra with Ken-David Masur conducting.
Illuminated Manuscripts: SFSO explains ‘Eroica’
The San Francisco Symphony set a high standard for musical education with ‘Keeping Score,’ an interactive immersion into great music and composers. Each episode features performance excerpts, scrolling score with annotations, and a wealth of historical context. There’s also a lot of MTT. All done with the technology and bandwidth available in 2006 and still unequaled. Click the image and dive headlong into the Eroica.
Image (c) 2006 San Francisco Symphony
Then try Mahler, Berlioz, Ives, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Copland, and Tchaikovsky.