Carl Tait on www.mp3.com

With some trepidation, I'd like to announce I've finally put some of my own piano playing on the Web at http://www.mp3.com/Carl_Tait

All of these performances are UNEDITED recordings of a recital given at Jeff and Helen Friedman's home in New York City on 20 June 2001. Many thanks to the Friedmans for providing the venue and a friendly atmosphere, and to Jeff for his careful recording with multiple microphone setups. (Careful listeners will notice a difference in sound during the Schubert: the more closely-placed mikes sounded better in that piece.)

Lo-fi play sounds awful; please listen to the hi-fi versions if at all possible. The F minor Ballade is probably the best piece to start with.

Very nice performances Carl. Thank you for sharing!! I like the Ballade very much. I will be going back for more. You have a musical approach that I enjoy. Keep it up! James

Carl, you're an inspiration to my more mediocre amateur efforts. Wonderful

Carl, this ballade i'm listening to is very interesting to me right now because of the interpretation and having just listened to Steve Layton's new piece. the interesting thing is that steve wanted to have a multileveled music of different spaces, and i think this is what Chopin was, in fact, always writing. with this in mind, i wonder at the extreme lyrical flattening of each of Chopin's comments in your performance? In Chopin the little figures aren't really ornaments, i think, but intrusions from another, and concurrent, musical space. your playing is very easy to listen to, but the abrupt changes of mentality in Chopin don't come through. i think Chopin is maybe more of a classical composer than a romantic. The Copland is perfect though! i think he really wants to build a landscape out of slowly introduced elements, and you phrasing gives a really nice warmth to the piece! The Rachmaninov has the problems for me that the Chopin has. You're making it sound like Albanez! and i think Rachmaninov was trying more for something like the Debussy Image Fêtes... more scintillation then surreptitious

now, for the B/B, the Albanez sounds very believable. My favorite violin performance is the Luka performance on baroque violin, where the chaconne reflects its spanish roots (!). i can imagine a young Samson François playing like this (hope that's not a total insult, but i like F.).

have to run to the airport, and i'll listen to the Shubert when i get back.

thanks!

Thanks for the constructive criticism; I agree that the quieter passages sometimes sound too smoothed out. I've been working hard on one of the amateur's most notorious problems

well, i think you're probably right. i'm remembering that R. played them smooth, and 'pearly' does really does do it justice. i'm probably rewriting it in my head so that, instead of a swirling curl of ribbon, the countermelodies are pulled out and revealed like cards in a deck and have independent lives.

so, if you did, how would you play Gaspard?

<snip>

64th note = 44.

Is that something 'decent people' do?

Yes, and stalking is something kooks do, Mr. kook-of-the-month-march-1998.

I've done both Ondine and Le Gibet, but have never finished slashing through Scarbo. Ondine seems to call for a muffled, inarticulate sound at the start, but Ravel's pupils Fevrier, Perlemuter, and Casadesus all contradict this. Perlemuter went so far as to say that Ravel wanted the accompaniment played 'non legato.' All three Ravel students are careful to play 'ppp ma poco articolato' at the start of their recordings: sort of like a quietly bubbling brook, not just a generic stream of water.

Argerich (among other pianists) opts for the more muffled approach, which she *almost* makes convincing....