Word: pianos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That was the first of some 130 rolls Gershwin made between 1916 and 1927, mostly of his own music. For decades the Gershwin piano rolls have largely been forgotten, known only to a handful of collectors who possessed both the rolls and the pianos upon which they could be played. Now, thanks to the enterprise of Gershwin scholar Artis Wodehouse, everyone can enjoy them: Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls (Elektra/Nonesuch) is an extraordinary, ebullient CD collection of 12 Gershwin tunes, including the famous Rhapsody in Blue...
...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...
...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 until she was satisfied with the performances. "I put in dynamics and accents," says Wodehouse. "I played the rolls over and over again, maybe...
...have this great piece of fate that someone was able to use technology in an utterly musical fashion like this," says Nonesuch general manager Robert Hurwitz. "When people hear it, they don't realize the role of technology, and they don't think it is a piano roll...
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...