Piano Notes by Charles Rosen

Author:Charles Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

CHAPTER SIX

RECORDING

THE PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE of recording differs in one important way from that of a recital. You begin a concert with the adrenaline of stage fright coursing through your veins but this wears off little by little as you become immersed in the act of performing. What may happen at a recording is the reverse. You start with complete confidence: this is a work you have mastered, and you believe that your interpretation will betray neither the composer’s music nor your own sense of style. Listening to a first take, you find it not bad, but you feel you can improve certain details. At a second try, if these details are not exactly what you hoped for, your confidence begins to fray at the edges. What we may call microphone fright appears on the horizon. In a concert, an effect that does not quite come off matters very little if the whole performance has vitality. In a recording, however, a slight slip of memory, a wrong note grazed are an irritant. They are an obstacle to the attempt to forget our own concerns and let the music take over our consciousness.

It is often thought that modern techniques of tape splicing have made recording much easier, but this is only partly true. Before tape, a record lasted at most 4½ minutes. It is not that difficult with music that one knows well to play 4½ minutes with almost perfect accuracy. Rachmaninov was said to walk into a recording studio and refuse to warm up; he would start recording immediately upon taking off his gloves. Then he would play a work as many as sixteen times. Even with all this effort, there are still occasional wrong notes in his recordings (I remember notably a passage in the Scherzo of Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat Minor), but his great performances would not be much improved by removing these blemishes.

The move to longer commercial recordings was gradual. The initial leap took place in the early 1950s with the use of vinyl and the first LPs or long-playing records. At first an LP side was limited to a little over 20 minutes, but in time this was increased to 30 and even 32 or 33 minutes. With the longer time, however, there was a danger that the grooves would run into each other: when I recorded Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze in 1963, my performance took 33 minutes and 27 seconds, and the producer begged me to remove at least one short repeat (I think in the end that I held fast, and the master disc for production was successfully made only because it was carefully supervised instead of being simply turned over to a machine). The two sides of an LP generally required 60 minutes of music or a little less. In the beginning the LP and vinyl were boon to smaller record companies: unlike shellac, vinyl was relatively unbreakable, shipping was no longer a problem, and processing the record was cheap once the studio costs were paid and the musicians given their modest stipend.

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