Word: pianists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...novel his conscience demanded of him. That was where his long troubles began. Torn between his artistic instincts and his political beliefs, he produced only a small portion of his second novel and then sank into decades of painful silence. In 1939 Roth married Muriel Parker, a composer and pianist, a union that would last 51 years until her death in 1990. The couple had two sons, and Roth did what he could to support a family. During World War II, he worked as a tool- and gaugemaker. After moving to Maine in 1946, he held a variety of jobs...
Piano rolls were not recordings; they were perforated rolls of paper capable of reproducing sounds that had been either hand-played by a pianist or simply punched by a roll editor, such as Frank Milne, whose spectacular four-hand arrangement of An American in Paris concludes the CD. Early rolls, played by a device called a Pianola, which fit over a conventional keyboard, were primitive affairs, capable of reproducing notes but little else; much depended on the Pianola's operator, who manipulated knobs and levers and pumped a foot bellows to make the contraption work. Later player pianos...
...task that confronted Wodehouse was to replicate as closely as possible the sound of Gershwin's own playing. "I spent thousands of hours listening to Gershwin's recordings," says Wodehouse, a Stanford-trained pianist and musicologist who got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1989 to work on the project. Using a rare 1911 88-note Pianola, in conjunction with a new Yamaha Disklavier, a kind of super-player piano that converts a performance into computer information, she was able to realize the earlier rolls. Wodehouse personally operated the Pianola and painstakingly fiddled with the rolls...
Wodehouse's efforts have been cheered by her fellow aficionados. "The ones I've heard have a live feeling, as if Gershwin were there," says Trebor Tichenor, a ragtime pianist and scholar in St. Louis, Missouri, who owns one of the largest private collections of piano rolls in America. Agrees collector Michael Montgomery, whose archives contain 100 of the extant Gershwin rolls: "It is the most careful, scholarly, faithful, high-integrity job that has ever been done with piano rolls...
...love object in Irene Brice (Elena Safonova), a concert singer in occupied Paris during World War II. Talented and high-spirited, apparently gliding through life, Irene can juggle the affections of a businessman husband (Richard Bohringer) and a lover (Samuel Labarthe) who is in the Resistance. Sophie, a promising pianist, is pleased to be Irene's accompanist and maid; she serves tea, irons, watches, tries to keep secrets. Servant and mistress, darkness and light -- why, the two women might be in different movies...