Alfred Reisenauer was a significant pupil of Franz Liszt. However, the fact that he left no acoustic recordings has meant that he has tended to be forgotten today. He was in fact one of the most important pianists of his time, acclaimed both as teacher and performer, achieving directorship of the Leipzig Conservatoire.
The only remaining recorded documents of his playing are ten piano rolls recorded for the Welte system in 1905.
This work is one of Liszt's arrangements of a Chopin Song (the "Chants Polonaises"), no.1 entitled "The Maiden's Wish". Reaisenauer signs off this roll as "Nach persönlichen Erinnerungen an Franz Liszt" (i.e. "From personal memory of [the playing of] Franz Liszt"), and is meant to show how Liszt performed this work.
Some technical info: this roll was played back not on a real piano, but is a digitised playback on a sampled Steinway piano made from a digitally encoded transcription of the original roll (all the dynamics, articulation, pedalling, and so on is unchanged from the original roll, and there has been no "editing" of it). This is something I am experimenting with doing at the moment and I am quite pleased with this result in general. However, perhaps this roll needs slightly more work at me getting the sonorities right, as it still sounds slightly midi-ish to my ear at least. The roll also seems to display a large degree of the rhythmic "bumpiness" which plagues many Welte rolls. What is obvious is that the performance employs a great deal of rubato which is quite alien to modern approaches. A decent playback of a good quality roll on a well-conditioned piano would create a better impression than I have done here I feel, as the piano sonority and internal resonances would help to make sense of it.
Finally, the picture used in this video is an interesting shot of Reisenauer. He is marked on the photo seated amongst some of Liszt's other pupils. Front row - Saul Liebling, Alexander Siloti (holding the Dante Symphony), Arthur Friedheim, Emil (not quite yet 'von') Sauer, Alfred Reisenauer. Alexander W. Gottschalg Back row - Moriz Rosenthal, Viktoria Drewing, Mele Paramanoff, Liszt, Friedheim's mother, Hugo Mansfeld (also with the Dante Symphony!)
30 май 2008
