Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Practice Makes Perfect?

An amusing anecdote opens an excellent piece in the Chicago Tribune:
In the early 1950s, pianist Paul Badura-Skoda and conductor Artur Rodzinski were listening to the playback of their just-edited recording of the two Chopin concertos. Badura-Skoda was hardly a great technician, thus the recording was a composite of hundreds of splices.

The pianist leaned back and remarked, "Not bad, eh?"
"It's beautiful," the veteran conductor replied. "Don't you wish you could play like that?"
More pungent this observation:

"
..we've accepted that aesthetic without murmur troubles me more than an isolated instance of a two-bit record producer's stealing piano recordings and packaging them under his wife's name."

You find it all here.

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