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Re: GG: learning pieces away from the piano



(Her [Grimaud's] 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."

I might add as a footnote, though, that right-hand-before-left is not as unusual as that NY Times writer seemed to think it was. Rachmaninoff and others of his generation did it as part of their style. And similarly, there is notated evidence in Forqueray's harpsichord pieces (publ. 1747) that it was done back then too. Expressive staggering of the voices is a basic part of harpsichord technique, not that that's relevant either to Grimaud or to Gould....


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