Re: Piano vs harpsichord

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

brad wrote

> Yeah, Jukka Tiensuu has done "The Fantastic Harpsichord," "The Exuberant
> Harpsichord," "The Frivolous Harpsichord," ... on Wittmayers.  You've
gotta
> remember, like Gould he's coming to this as a pianist.  He certainly has
> the chops of moving his fingers fast and playing tricky modern
> rhythms.  But I wish he'd left the Baroque stuff off these albums (and put
> more modern pieces in their place) because he sounds a lot more
comfortable
> in the expressionistic twitchy modern stuff.

I don't know the other recordings that Brad mentioned, but I agree that the
most successful pieces to my ears are the "twitchy modern stuff."  Anyone
out there a big fan of Gould's version of the finale to Prokoviev's Seventh
Sonata?  I am, and I know a few of you are as well. If you like the way that
piece jumps around while steam-rolling forward, or perhaps you're fans of
Prokoviev's Toccata which may be more widely known, then I think you'll find
some of Tiensuu's performance's interesting.  It's harpsichord playing
unlike any you've probably ever heard.


>
> The way Tiensuu plays Ligeti's "Continuum" (an extremely difficult piece
> requiring a harpsichord with pedals to change the stops) is
> phenomenal.  There are thousands of notes in three and a half minutes, and
> it sounds as if he gets them all.  The piece is like an electronic blur, a
> swash of hardly-identifiable tone color, and he totally nails it.  That's
> the kind of music a Wittmayer is good at.
>
I don't know his version, but I do know Chojnacka's, and once again, I
encourage any of you that, say, at the very least think that  Gould's finale
to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, taken at an unbelievable clip, is
interesting, you should also check out this Ligeti high tempo work.  Ligeti,
by the way, is a composer who tries to makes use of the fact that man is an
messy, biological, inherently interpretive listening machine; he makes music
that tries to play with, as he says "pattern-illusion."  In this work by
having the player perform it at an extremly fast speed he's tried to get
sonorities out of the harpsichord, or perhaps simply in your mind's ear,
that you normally don't experience.  Interesting work.

Check out Colin Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano while you're at it.

Jim