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Re: Piano vs harpsichord
At 08:55 AM 4/19/01 -0700, Jim Morrison wrote:
Brad wrote
>
> And to turn Gould's own chromatic fantasy quip back to him: the Wittmayer
> is "a harpsichord for people who don't like harpsichord." Gould himself
> wrote that he chose it because it's like a piano....
speaking of Wittmayers, and Brad may never forgive me for sending this link
along :) but there's a fun disc of harpsichord music called "The
Frivolous Harpsichord," which is performed on a Wittmayer. Most of the
compositions were written in the later half of the 20th century.
But that ain't nothin' compared with the way Don Angle plays the
Charleston, Blowin' in the Wind, We're in the Money, Mr Bojangles, Carolina
in the Morning, and some other pretty hot swingin' stuff. All his own
arrangements. Donald Angle on Harpsichord, AFKA 517, 1990. There were
some LP's before that. He comes to it from a background in
country-western, pop, jazz, and accordion. He plays on a Dowd
harpsichord. Nobody else sounds like this guy. It's a great party record.
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.
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.
Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl or http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
clavichord CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl
trumpet and organ: http://www.mp3.com/hlduo
"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot