I’m feeling a little less crazy tonight. I’ve been wondering for some time if I just didn’t get something fundamental about being a pianist and/or a professional musician. That something is that you can make a really fine recording of a work you’ve performed on numerous occasions, but if you haven’t had many performances of the thing, your recording isn’t liable to be all that great. Was I somehow not getting something? That a person could make tons of really great CDs in a very short time span without putting in the time and energy required to create great performances?
So here we had this pianist who had a reasonable but unspectacular career back in the 1950s and 1960s, and then in the 1990s, after a long retirement, suffering from cancer, going back into her recording studio (built for her at home) and turning out a gigantic series of recordings that had become fetishist items for most of the CD-review types, who are prone to such fetishism. To read some of the reviews you’d think this woman was Liszt, Hofmann, Rachmaninoff, Godowsky, and Artur Schnabel all combined; the best of each and none of the quirks.
My overall reaction was: oh, come on. You’re just hearing what you want to hear — which wouldn’t be the first time a critic hears a performer through the ears of wishful thinking. Dammit, she just can’t be that good. Understand that I haven’t heard any of the recordings so I was going with a gut reaction only. But still, gut reaction is gut reaction and as a pianist and musician I’m not quite so liable to go into hyperdrive over a performer.
But, as it turns out, something that hadn’t really occurred to me appears to be the actual truth of the case: the CDs are fakes. They’re just re-labelled ripoffs of other pianists’s recordings.
Which makes me curious to hear some of them. I seriously doubt that CD critics could really tell the difference between one piano and another — but any pianist can. I’m not about to mistake a recording made on a Hamburg Steinway for a recording made on a Bechstein or a Bosendorfer, etc. And rooms have their own acoustic qualities, despite whatever digital enhancing can be done nowadays.
It seems interesting to me that none of the fetishist CD reviewer types were picking up on any of that — but judging from the source of the various fakes (all over the place) there would be a lot of differences in pianos and room surroundings.
One of the people to have started ‘breaking’ the case is, in fact, easily one of the strongest Joyce Hatto fetishists out there. I wonder what he’s thinking right now? (Outside of a lot of unprintable words, I should imagine.)
This should continue to be very, very interesting…