Michael Cooper wrote:

>Evgeni Kissin's recital in Chicago in 1998 was an exciting event, hardly
>marred by his mistakes in the fugue of the Beethoven sonata.  I'm actually
>disappointed to think that if any of his recitals from that or another year
>were preserved on disk, that it would be "cleaned-up" and made in my eyes,
>more sterile and like a studio recording.  I'd prefer the thousands of live
>mistakes by Richter, Cortot, Horowitz, et al.  that we have preserved, to
>the sanitized recording and sanitized playing which disgraces many of our
>modern recordings.

I find it interesting that Richter is cited here.  In some of his
recordings, there are over 400 edits (if memory serves, the Liszt E-flat
concerto is one of them).  Even Horowitz finally got smart and cleaned
up the opening of the finale of the Rachmaninoff 3rd (the last one with
Ormandy, which was "live"); hearing a cacphonous mess at this point
every time I listened to the original lost its charm in a big hurry.

If one records a live concert, one is *recording* the work of art, which is
the performance.  If one is making a recording, then one is *making* a work
of art, which is the recording.  Recording is to movies as concerts are to
stage plays: one is an edited medium, the other is not.

I've read commentators from the '30s who argued against using the closeup
in movies on the grounds that it violates the decorum of the theatre.  I'm
sure nobody today would advocate sticking a camera in the middle of the
theatre and filming, say, Shakespeare in real time as a legitimate way to
translate his work from theatre to cinema.  Why, then, do we get so uptight
about editing a musical recording? Maybe its some kind of macho thing.
("Hey, man, he recorded the whole thing IN ONE TAKE!!!  Gimme a beer!")

I remember playing Perahia's note-perfect, and musically superb recording
of the Chopin F-minor Concerto for a collegue at school, who, during the
entire thing, took strips off it because of its supposed "sterility",
caused, in his mind, by the editing...  'till at the end, the audience
exploded wildly into applause.  My point? Any bias against recordings
often has to do with prejudice, rather than with what is actually heard.

Just my 2-cents worth.

Leslie Kinton
The Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto.
Anagnoson and Kinton piano duo website: http://www.pianoduo.com