Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...original piano rolls were made through a technique perfected in 1904 by the famed German firm of M. Welte & Sohne. Special pianos were fitted with carbon rods extending downward from each key. As the keys were struck, the rods dipped into a tray of mercury, completing an electric circuit that controlled the pressure of an inked rubber wheel turning against a roll of tissue-thin paper. The wheel marked the paper faintly if the key was struck softly; fortissimos produced a wide mark because the force of the pianist's finger sank the carbon rod deeper in the mercury...
...Piano Treasures." He also recorded the likes of Ravel, Debussy and Mahler long before they had gained popular acceptance, tolerating Debussy's monumental ego ("There have been produced so far in this world two great musicians," Debussy once told him, "Beethoven and me."), encouraging timid players such as Edvard Grieg, whose embarrassment at the keyboard often reduced him to hopeless laughter. In the years before the vogue of the phonograph silenced his studios, Welte's legacy included performances by more than 100 pianists and composers...
...piano rolls were hidden in a Black Forest cave during World War II, and in 1948, an American enthusiast named Richard Simonton bought the rolls from the poor and aging Welte. But the first attempts to record them two years later were marred by everything from the sound of overhead airplanes to freezing temperatures that kept the piano out of tune. Further attempts since then have achieved somewhat better results, but nothing close to contemporary sound standards. Last year Simonton turned the rolls over to Walter Heebner, 46, a master of modern recording techniques. Played back on a modern Steinway...
Heebner is counting on musicologists and students of the piano to provide him with something of a perpetual trust fund; the records, he thinks, will never go out of date. But flawless and fascinating as they are, careful listeners may find them full of disturbing surprises. Many of the classic works are given performances that are difficult to reconcile with modern piano interpretation. The effect of changing taste and style on the music is startlingly apparent...
...that, students of the history of piano-playing may now find answers to many of the questions that nag their conversation (But how good was Busoni?), for the sweep of genius from those halcyon days is very nearly complete. The old pianists seem far more individual and whimsical than today's players. Saint-Saens had a touch like Sonny Liston; Olga Samaroff, born Lucie Hicken-looper in Texas and once married to Stokowski, had all the percussive power of a butterfly...