My Life With The Great Pianists

Memoirs of the piano technician who tuned pianos for many great performers, including Vladimir Horowitz, Van Cliburn, Artur Rubenstein, Glen Gould, and others.

Mohr's humor and personal perspective on the lives of Rubinstein, Horowitz, and other artists mix music lore with quiet faith.

Surveys the careers and personalities of the great pianists from Clementi and Mozart to the present day.

Charles Rosen is one of the world's most talented pianists -- and one of music's most astute commentators. Known as a performer of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Elliott Carter, he has also written highly acclaimed criticism for sophisticated students and professionals. In Piano Notes, he writes for a broader audience about an old friend -- the piano itself. Drawing upon a lifetime of wisdom and the accumulated lore of many great performers of the past, Rosen shows why the instrument demands such a stark combination of mental and physical prowess. Readers will gather many little-known insights -- from how pianists vary their posture, to how splicings and microphone placements can ruin recordings, to how the history of composition was dominated by the piano for two centuries. Stories of many great musicians abound. Rosen reveals Nadia Boulanger's favorite way to avoid commenting on the performances of her friends ("You know what I think," spoken with utmost earnestness), why Glenn Gould's recordings suffer from "double-strike" touches, and how even Vladimir Horowitz became enamored of splicing multiple performances into a single recording. Rosen's explanation of the piano's physical pleasures, demands, and discontents will delight and instruct anyone who has ever sat at a keyboard, as well as everyone who loves to listen to the instrument. In the end, he strikes a contemplative note. Western music was built around the piano from the classical era until recently, and for a good part of that time the instrument was an essential acquisition for every middle-class household. Music making was part of the fabric of social life. Yet those days have ended. Fewer people learn the instrument today. The rise of recorded music has homogenized performance styles and greatly reduced the frequency of public concerts. Music will undoubtedly survive, but will the supremely physical experience of playing the piano ever be the same?

Fact of Life: If you want to succeed in a big way, you need a proven system that actually works. Here it is ... get ready for an enlightening and entertaining romp through music history guaranteed to inspire. "The indispensables in pianistic success - are they not very much the same in all successes?" Josef Hofmann Yes, indeed! - and the reverse sentiment holds as well. The indispensables in any success are very much like mastering the art of playing the piano.The 19th century was a Golden Age of piano music when the likes of Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt set a standard yet to be exceeded. Enclosed, please find an amazing collection of wisdom gleaned from hundreds of old books, articles, letters and diaries in which history's most successful pianists and composers reveal how they did it. Here are their intimate thoughts on purpose, motivation, discipline, perseverance, even health and social skills - not to mention technique. Caution: a number of sacred cows from today's self-help scene will be ground into hamburger meat by a bunch of long-haired musicians. Better fasten your seat belt as the 'awakening' may occasionally be a bit rude. "When necessary - speak; and in a way that people will remember ... Whoever is most impertinent has the best chance." Mozart The era saw great advances in psychology and education, so relevant thinking by Freud, Jung, Reich, Montessori, Suzuki and Dalcroze is duly examined and integrated by the author. Also included is a lucid explanation of the Alexander Technique and its critical importance to optimal mind/body performance. This book is brimming with powerful information to fuel your dreams. Whether you're in the performing arts, business, management, education, or just looking to raise the bar in your personal life - this book is for you. It will rev up your engine and cause you to shift not only gears but thought paradigms.It's 19th century wisdom for a transcendent 21st.

Vladimir de Pachmann was perhaps history’s most notorious pianist. Widely regarded as the greatest player of Chopin’s works, Pachmann embedded comedic elements—be it fiddling with his piano bench or flirting with the audience—within his classic piano recitals to alleviate his own anxiety over performing. But this wunderkind, whose admirers included Franz Liszt and music critic James Gibbons Huneker (who cheekily nicknamed Pachmann the “Chopinzee”), would by the turn of the century find his antics on the concert stage scorned by critics and out of fashion with listeners, burying his pianistic legacy. In Chopin’s Prophet: The Life of Pianist Vladimir de Pachmann, the first biography ever of this remarkable figure, Edward Blickstein and Gregor Benko explore the private and public lives of this master pianist, surveying his achievements within the context of contemporary critical opinion and preserving his legacy as one of the last great Romantic pianists of his time. Chopin’s Prophet paints a colorful portrait of classical piano performance and celebrity at the turn of the 20th century while also documenting Pachmann’s attraction to men, which ultimately ended his marriage but was overlooked by his audiences. As the authors illustrate, Pachmann lived in a radically different world of music making, one in which eccentric personality and behavior fit into a much more flexible, and sometimes mysterious, musical community, one where standards were set not by certified experts with degrees but by the musicians themselves. Detailing the evolution of concert piano playing style from the era of Chopin until World War I, Chopin’s Prophet tells the fantastic and true story of an artist of and after his time.

The first major biography of Glenn Gould to stress the critical influence of the Canadian context on his life and art Glenn Gould was not, as has previously been suggested, an isolated and self-taught eccentric who burst out of nowhere onto the international musical scene in the mid-1950s. He was, says Kevin Bazzana in this fascinating new full-scale biography, very much a product of his time and place – and his entire life and diverse work reflect his Canadian heritage. Bazzana, editor of the international Glenn Gould magazine, throws fresh light on this and many other aspects of Gould’s celebrated life as a pianist, writer, broadcaster, and composer. He portrays Gould’s upbringing in Toronto’s neighbourhood of The Beach in the 1930s, revealing the area’s influence as a distinct social, religious, and cultural milieu. He looks at the impact of Canadian radio on the young musician, his relations with the “new music” crowd in Toronto, and the ways in which his career was furthered by the extraordinary growth of Canada’s cultural institutions in the 1950s. He examines Gould’s place within the CBC “culture” of the 1960s and ‘70s, and his distinctly Canadian sense of humour. Bazanna also reveals new information on Gould’s famous eccentricities, his sometimes bizarre stage manner, his highly selective repertoire, his control mania, his private and sexual life, his hypochondria, his romanticism, and his abrupt retirement from concert performance to communicate solely through electronic and print media. And finally, he takes a detailed look at the extraordinary phenomenon of the posthumous “life” that Gould and his work have enjoyed.