Speaking of Things to Listen To

Check out "PianoWorldRadio"

An internet radio station broadcasting over Live365 nothing but piano.

You find it here.

Hatto Undone

Hatto's husband fesses up to the fraud.

"“Although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Barrington-Coupe says that Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself,” Mr. Inverne wrote. “Recording session after recording session was marred by her many grunts of pain as she played, and her husband was at a loss to know how to cover the problem passages.”

It was then that Mr. Barrington-Coupe began inserting small patches from other recordings to cover his wife’s grunts, Mr. Inverne said. Subsequently, he used longer passages and discovered how to stretch the time of the original recordings digitally to disguise their origin. “However, he maintains that his wife knew nothing of the deception,” Mr. Inverne added."

Read the rest here


I felt and continue to feel nothing but sadness about the whole matter.



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As noted in a reader's comment over on Jessica Duchen's great blog , the Pristine Audio website (your must click stop for Hatto info) has a link near the top of the page under a banner
"FULL-LENGTH SAMPLER - FREE MUSIC DOWNLOAD ". Download it. Now. It provides a download to a zip file containing some truly amazing restorations/re-masterings of real treasures.

Meet the left handed piano

It's today's web pick. Pianos for south paws.

Check it out.

Ray Evans, Dead at age 92

Sad news.

Link.

The Hatto Affair

Click on over to Jessica Duchen's excellent blog for a set of links to recent online discussions of the scandal surrounding the alleged faked recordings by pianist Joyce Hatto.

Anna Nicole: The Opera ?

Greg Stepanich has hit on a brilliant idea

as an opera, Anna’s story has a lot to recommend it: Youthful hardship, the accident of physical beauty leading to her manipulation by powerful men, her bizarre public career, her fight over a multimillion-dollar estate, her quest for domestic happiness, the death of her beloved son days after the birth of a daughter, her sudden death.

Read the rest here

paging la cieca

Kitten on the Keys

This really is a cat that loves playing the piano



Delightful!

Grunts, barks and gestures

Thanks to "Bloc de Musica" for pointing the way to an interesting review of of "The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body".

Check it out !

Le travail du rêve ne pense pas

Solitude in Music has up a post on becoming conscious of music that has randomly started playing in your mind. And that post got me to thinking: I usually have the opposite problem. I usually get things stuck in my head and it tends to be the same pieces.

They don't really bother me. They just, well, insist like a sore thumb. Recently it was Prince's "Little Red Corvette".(But in my head it's always the Sandra Bernhard version). Before that I was obsessed with Melanie's "Brand New Key". So much that I spent an inordinate amount time trying to work out an elaborate piano solo version. With classical music it's a fairly limited pile of ear worms. The Brahms 2nd piano concerto is one of them. And usually it is the 2nd movement that leaps out unannounced. I'll just be riding an elevator or slicing veggies or whatever and suddenly I'll realize I'm humming it. Or bits of Beethoven's 6th symphony, or some Bach chorale. Is it so random?

At the piano, a different kind of "limited randomness" takes place. What I mean is this: when I sit down at a piano I've not played before, I think it's a bit like shaking hands. And usually it's going to something from a very small archipelago of works leaping without thought from my hands. Why those specific works? I don't know. I don't have any special or inordinate fondness for them. They just insist in and at the moment when hand touches key. Ca parle.

"..a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ça parle), that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be found the structure of language, of which he becomes the material, and that therefore resounds in him..." (Lacan)

Currently listening to: John Cage - Solo for Cello (1957-58)

Yamaha to Close U.S. Piano Plant

 

AP is reporting that Yamaha will close it's plant in Thomaston, GA. 

Link

 

Currently listening to: Carl Czerny - Ouverture charactéristique et brillante Op.54 for Piano Four Hands