Four Pierian Recordings PR0001, 0002, 0018, 0024 [JW]: Classical Music Reviews

I’ve reviewed a number of Pierian piano-roll discs before, and this is a good opportunity to consolidate a few more reviews in one article.

The Debussy rolls are probably the best know in this sequence of four CDs. They were recorded for Welte in Paris in 1913. As the notes make clear there are textual changes incorporated in some of these performances that shed light on Debussy’s compositional processes. These small variants are of some significance and the authenticity of their existence can hardly be doubted. That said other aspects of Debussy’s playing, as is habitual in piano roll recordings, are to be taken on trust. Wide discrepancies regarding tempi can be inferred to be part of his own intention, but apart from La cathédrale engloutie where there is some sizeable tempo discrepancy things are never really clear-cut. It seems impossible for instance that he played The Golliwog’s Cake-Walk in the stilted and rhythmically mechanical way it’s presented in this roll. The appendix consists of the 1904 G&T discs – not rolls, obviously – that Debussy made as a pianist when accompanying Mary Garden. These four commercial sides have been better transferred elsewhere – and I wish that the piano could be pitch-stabilized in the way that Marston has managed for problematic Paris G&T sessions of around this time.

In a way similar to Debussy, the Granados disc is valuable inasmuch as it too preserves the composer’s own variants. Whilst Frank Marshall was closely associated with performance of Granados’s own piano works the composer demonstrated these many variant passages to him, and others, and these 1913 rolls corroborate Granados’s well-known quasi-improvisational approach to his own music. One can, I think, go as far as endorsing the tempo relations within the pieces as representing Granados’s express intentions but questions of rhythm, colour, dynamics and a whole host of other vital things, are very much more problematic. These documents are fascinating but they are ultimately tangential. There is a fascinating example at the end – an appendix with the same piece of music (a Scarlatti sonata in B flat minor) played by Granados on both a roll and a disc. To my ear the rhythmic inflexibility of the roll is clear and the 1913 disc, for all its sonic imperfections, represents authentic Granados playing unmediated by mechanics in the way that the roll is.

The Scriabin disc offers a variety of things. Most prominent is the series of rolls the composer left behind in Moscow in 1910 shortly before his early death. The Op.11 No.2 Prelude is lumpy – surely a long way from Scriabin’s real intentions – but again it’s the tempo relationships and things like the accelerandi that may give one an inkling as to his genuine imprint. The famed Op.8 No.12 Etude is here, but no sonatas. The Mazurka Op.40 No.2 sounds almost flippant. There follows a roster of pianists playing single works or sets. Josef Lhevinne was the earliest to be recorded – Freiburg, 1906 – and American Austin Conradi recorded the longest sequence other than Scriabin himself. Despite the limitations of the roll system the Op.45 No,1 Album Leaf sounds haunting. But Pouishnoff’s 1926 roll of Kresse Dansée is very jerky and unlifelike.

The final disc contains those two fascinating near-contemporaries, Casella and Respighi conjoined in a four hands, single piano arrangement of The Fountains of Rome, recorded on rolls in New York in 1926. Again it’s to be taken with several pinches of salt, but it does remain a fascinating artefact in the composer’s own arrangement, It was new music too when the two sat down to record it on rolls. The Ancient Airs and Dances are played by Richard Singer. Casella plays a number of his own pieces. He had been a friend of Debussy so his performances of the composer’s work should not be dismissed. Casella also plays a series of Spanish pieces – Granados, Albéniz, and some Scarlatti - before embarking on a series of his own compositions. The repertoire here is instructive as is the playing in the Pezzi Infantili, which was split into two rolls. Carlo Zecchi, later to be well known, also performs Casella, in 1926.

To act as an appendix we also have the commercial 78s that Respighi made with his wife Elsa in Brazil in 1927. These are rare items, and come from the collection of Adriano. Early electrics, they are a little worn and have a touch of blasting, but are uncommon, and it’s very valuable to hear the voice for whom Respighi wrote many of his post-1919 songs.

Given the caveats that always need to be made regarding piano rolls, these are individually and collectively fascinating documents. And they have been well collated by the Pierian team.

Jonathan Woolf

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