GG: learning pieces away from the piano

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

Here's another pianist who learns pieces without touching the piano:
http://www.wdehaan.demon.nl/schwann.html (an interview with Helene Grimaud,
the woman who runs with the wolves).

More similarities with GG: she's recorded the Brahms intermezzi
outstandingly, she has her own version of a Lake Simcoe (a farm in
Pennsylvania), she plays Yamaha pianos....

And from the 1994 NY Times interview
(http://www.wdehaan.demon.nl/int_nyt.html):

"Like so many pianists of her generation, she adduces Glenn Gould as her
idol, although she concedes that her playing little resembles his. She
admires his structural rigor and rhythmic incisiveness, insisting that she
uses no pedal except in actual performance (Her real practising, she adds,
comes away from the piano, reading a score, with an occasional foray to the
keyboard to check out an idea.).  She considers Gould a soul mate in part
because of the way his recordings eerily certify things she has already
done on her own she said. She discovered to her delight that Gould
corrected the same "wrong" notes in Brahms's Opus 118 that she did. And
like him, she often breaks chords by playing one hand slightly before the
other - unusually, the right hand first."


Bradley Lehman
Dayton VA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl