Readers who have ploughed
through my previous reviews of various
piano roll discs from Pierian, Tudor
and Naxos will know that I tend to start
by an explicatory paragraph on the virtues
of the Welte-Mignon system. That’s not
quite as pertinent here because Pitot,
Hess and Chaminade all recorded for
Duo-Art. It’s not immediately apparent
from the documentation to this disc
for which company Landowska recorded,
whether Welte, Ampico or even Duo-Art
itself. But I’ll include the paragraph
here anyway for those who are unfamiliar
with the Welte system.
The Welte-Mignon piano
used a series of carbon rods attached
to each of the keys which lowered into
a trough of mercury to complete an electrical
circuit when the pianist hit a note.
The circuit caused inked rollers to
mark a roll of paper with the note itself
and also the speed and depth of the
attacked note. Playback was possible
before the roll was manually perforated
for public consumption on a player piano.
Theoretically then dynamic shading and
pedalling could be registered by the
complex system but Welte-Mignon was,
irrespective of the secrecies and ambiguities
of the system, something of a world
leader in the player piano world. Something
of their eminence can be gauged by the
composers who went to record for them
– Mahler, Ravel and Debussy amongst
them.
Dal Segno is undertaking
an extensive series of piano roll issues
based on 1992 transfers. The quartet
of performers here share a common sex;
Landowska, Hess and Chaminade are all
well known from their disc recordings
(Chaminade’s are early G&Ts currently
on APR), though Landowska’s piano records
have always been more elusive than the
many she made as a harpsichordist. Genevieve
Pitot is little known except to specialists
and she was mainly a transcriber whose
meteoric early career – she was fifteen
when she made the earliest of her rolls
here – was not sustained later in life.
It doesn’t take much
digging about to point out the manifold
limitations of the player piano system.
Hess recorded the Scarlatti Sonata in
1940 and we can contrast it with her
1926 roll. On disc she is full of rhythmic
nuance, colouristic sheen, teasing accents
and deft rubati – playful, affectionate
and warm. On the roll, she is dead as
a dodo, rhythmically flat, dynamically
even, monotonous and mechanical. I would
advise you to contrast her commercial
recording of the Brahms Intermezzo Op.119/3
(HMV 1941 or the live 1949 University
of Illinois performance on APR) with
the player piano travesty – which is
the nearest you can get to a barrel
organ without being arrested.
It’s potentially useful
to have items that she didn’t record
commercially, not least the Beethoven
sonata, or performances with eminent
colleagues such as the one here with
Harold Bauer (though she did record
on disc with Hamilton Harty, her Columbia
stable mate – Bauer was contracted to
Victor/HMV). But the odds against musical
pleasure are too heavy. Similarly with
Landowska, who contributes sonatas by
Mozart and Beethoven and the latter’s
Andante favori. The playing sounds very
un-Landowska like in its inert mechanistic
insistence and shouldn’t be taken at
all as an index of her piano playing
– the commercial disc recordings are
the ones to have.
In Volume 2 the same
strictures apply to the Chaminade rolls.
She recorded Fauns in London
in 1901 and whilst it’s a very tough
listen (find it on APR) we can still
appreciate her rubati and the middle
voicings she brings out. The 1921 roll
by contrast is linear and flat and devoid
of rhythmic subtleties of any kind,
results clearly due to the medium not
to the messenger. But it’s useful to
have some examples of the young Pitot’s
charming morceaux.
The 1992 recordings
were made on a concert grand in an ample
acoustic with a touch of ambient noise
and what sounds like tape hiss. Proof-reading
of the booklets needs to be tightened
and we simply have to have the original
release numbers. It’s really not good
enough to note duration time and the
roll date without specifics of that
kind. I’d also be interested to know
if some of the Hess rolls were issued
under the Duo Art name or under Audiograph’s.
Jonathan Woolf
DAL SEGNO DSPRCD 011 [73.11] 
