On Jan 28, 2010, at 9:44 AM, reggaepass at aol.com wrote: > In my experience, it's remarkable how much they sound like modern > instruments. The biggest changes are back around 1840 - 1860. After > that, they sound like our pianos, more or less. Yes, this is certainly the case. The author of the above quote (Alan's anonymous MDS) was writing about playing the Liszt pianos in Vienna, which were from the later parts of his life, and those do approach the modern instrument fairly closely in a relative sense. But Liszt's career was from 1830-1885 or so, so he was writing and playing before the beginning of that period of 1840-60 when the big changes happened. That's when he made his reputation. So was Chopin, and both learned, as boys, on instruments from the 1815-1830 period. We think of Liszt and Chopin as defining the sound of the piano. But their experience was with a very different instrument (especially Chopin, who didn't live to see the changes that happened in Liszt's time). Not to say that their music should always be played on the historically accurate instrument, but I think it can be a revelation, as much as for Beethoven or Mozart, especially for the pianist feeling the difference in action, and hearing the different tonal response to the technique. It suggests new ways of hearing and different approaches to interpretation, which is always a good thing. For the audience, it may or may not be as revelatory, depending how well the pianist in question has adapted to the piano in question - not to mention expectations from years of hearing something far different. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100128/5aca69d0/attachment.htm>
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