Re: GG: learning pieces away from the piano

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

> (Her [Grimaud's] real practising, she adds,
> comes away from the piano, reading a score, with an occasional foray to the
> keyboard to check out an idea.).  She considers Gould a soul mate in part
> because of the way his recordings eerily certify things she has already
> done on her own she said. She discovered to her delight that Gould
> corrected the same "wrong" notes in Brahms's Opus 118 that she did. And
> like him, she often breaks chords by playing one hand slightly before the
> other - unusually, the right hand first."

I might add as a footnote, though, that right-hand-before-left is not as
unusual as that NY Times writer seemed to think it was.  Rachmaninoff and
others of his generation did it as part of their style.  And similarly,
there is notated evidence in Forqueray's harpsichord pieces (publ. 1747)
that it was done back then too.  Expressive staggering of the voices is a
basic part of harpsichord technique, not that that's relevant either to
Grimaud or to Gould....


Bradley Lehman
Dayton VA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl