Consider if you will (and it’s worth it, even if such things do not interest you) the following reviews of Granados’s piano work Goyescas.
A. ? the Goyescas are ?piano music of the purest kind?, giving one ?the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers through masses of richly coloured jewels?, and it is this sensory magic that glistens in every bar of Joyce Hatto’s scintillating and evocative performance. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that a more torrid and stunning realisation of Granados’s ultra-Spanish masterpiece is hard to imagine. Her idiomatic rubato, whether subtle or bold, colours and inflects every facet of music that veers from radiance to desolation, from blazing sunlight to a death-haunted poetry. Opening with El pelele, Hatto revels in its wild exuberance before continuing with readings of an astonishing stylistic fervour and conviction, and never more so than in ?El Amor y la Muerte?, a powerful elegy at the very heart of the Goyescas.
_ Bryce Morrison, Gramophone, January 2007.
B. ?[Heisser] quickly makes you aware of a pianist pushed close to his limit. Exuberant and big-hearted he may be (terms such as con anima or appassionato molto find a ready and inflammatory response). But he can make heavy weather of more piquant or delicate requests (con gallardia or avec beaucoup de grace), struggling to separate prime melodic lines from serpentine strands and figurations always threatening to engulf and obscure their song. His trills are less than ideally fluent at the end of ?Quejas o la meja y el ruisenor? and time and again I missed an essential liberation from the score, an aristocratic distancing and resolution of all difficulty.
_ Bryce Morrison, Gramophone, May 1997
You guessed it: the performance Morrison praises in A is the same one he buckets in B. There are, to be fair, differences of tempo: some bits are slowed down, others sped up. Still and all. Poor Morrison should have waited a few weeks.
On February 15th, 2007 the news broke that some of the recordings by the late British pianist Joyce Hatto (1928-2006) released on the Concert Artist label were in fact illegal copies of recordings by other pianists.
The news was in fact broken by Andrew Rose, of Pristine Records, and you can read all about it here.
Yes but still and all what? That CD reviewers talk through their necks? That “it’s all a matter of opinion”?
As I pull out CDs I haven’t played in a while, especially those I didn’t much care for, I sometimes find my experience of the music is so different that it might be another performance. If of course this happened regularly and capriciously it would substantiate the sceptic. But there are hundreds of CDs to which my responses, while not uniform, which would be inhuman, nonetheless fall within close-set margins. There are some performances which I’ve known for close on fifty years (scary) and admire as much and more today as I did when a green younker.
But there are moods and there are circumstances, and everything from a tiresomely hot day to an interfering lawnmower can throw out concentration and inhibit the surrender to music. You just do get some things wrong.
But not, surely that wrong? And which review is wrong? And why hasn’t Gramophone done the right thing by their reviewer and pulled the reviews, – or corrected the public record by adding a note to each review? Is it their idea of scrupulousness, or is it another case of the multitudinous Web overpowering our energies?
Thanks for this. It’s a fascinating set of documents, particularly to the extent that it allows one to discover to how much recording engineers manipulate what they work with.
Taking it a step further, one wonders how much longer real pianists will be needed. It’s so much trouble, having a expensive, real B?sendorfer in the studio and in tune, and then adjusting microphones and dealing with a sensitive, over-trained performer. Why not just get a computer to play the (already sampled) required notes and have total control over the acoustics and the ‘expression’?
[...] Garry, commenting on the Hatto business, wonders if record producers will eventually eliminate the live performer altogether and just splice notes into a completely synthetic performance. Let me take that straight and see where it goes. I guess there are approximations already in those eerily perfect studio recordings based on numerous takes and lots of editing. These don’t correspond to any one performance. But yes, eliminating the original performer altogether – and calling the product a performance – that would be a step beyond. [...]