‘Sometimes the greatest
perfection of playing fails to be understood
by contemporary listeners. Most often,
lack of appreciation is the fate of
playing that is blessed by refinement
and poetry.’ Samuil Feinberg
Time was when Samuil
Evgenievich Feinberg - composer, transcriber,
pianist, teacher, Jewish intellectual
- was little more than a name outside
the Soviet Union. In recent years, though,
he’s come firmly into the Western consciousness
as transcriber and composer. This happened
despite, as he put it, having been ‘absolutely
knocked out of the composition world’
by his other responsibilities (‘creative
work needs […] even more [cultivation]
than performing work’).
Feinberg is represented
discographically through Volodos’s resurrection
of the scherzo arrangement from Tchaikovsky’s
Pathétique Symphony (Sony
Classical SK 62691 [1996]), made famous
originally by Lazar Berman (whose 1952
recording is included in Brilliant Classics
new Berman Edition release [93006]);
Hamelin’s The Composer-Pianists
(Hyperion CDA 67050 [1998]); Roscoe’s
double-CD collection of the complete
transcriptions after Bach (Hyperion
CDA 67468 [2003]); and the twelve piano
sonatas (1915-62), imagined by Nikolaeva
to be ‘poems of life’ (BIS CD 1413/14
[2003] review
review).
[We might also add Aura423-2
- Len]
And as pianist he appears
on a selection of discs. ‘Pinnacle of
Bach pianism’, legendary among pianophiles,
the 1958-59 Melodiya 6-LP set of the
Forty Eight, issued in New York
two years subsequently (Artia MK 211/12),
is near-impossible to find outside libraries.
Similarly the Russian Piano School 4-CD
release (RCD 16231) - though copies
from Eastern Europe turn up occasionally
on e-bay. A BMG/Melodiya anthology of
Bach and Mozart (74321 25175 2, recorded
in Moscow between 1951 and 1962) is
deleted.
Through the remarkable
initiative of Allan Evans at Arbiter,
however - a connoisseur with a knack
for searching out archive material no-one
else ever seems to get close to - an
essential presence is even so ensured
in the current market-place. Arbiter
118 (1999) [review],
collecting recordings made between 1929
and 1948 in Berlin and Moscow for the
Polydor, SSSR and Dolgoigraiushchaya
labels, includes Beethoven’s Appassionata,
a pair of Liszt Consolations (Nos.
5, 6), Feinberg’s own Suite Op. 11,
and music by Bach, Liadov, Schumann,
Scriabin and Stanchinsky. The new compilation
(2005) draws together previously unpublished
Bach recordings in stereo (1961-62)
as well as a performance of Scriabin’s
Fifth Sonata salvaged from a recital
given in the Small Hall of the Moscow
Conservatory in January 1948.
‘A very cultured man,
spiritual, modest, and with a profound
dislike of self-promotion […] a deeply
visionary artist […] fully aware of
the abysses and ambiguities of modern
life’ (Christophe Sirodeau, 2003), Feinberg
was born in Odessa, 26 May 1890. Brought
up in Moscow on a diet of Bach and Beethoven,
the Classics and Romantics, he studied
most notably with Alexander Goldenweiser
at the Conservatory, associate and friend
of Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Medtner.
Making sure he heard the greats of the
day in concert - D'Albert, Reisenauer,
Hofmann - he applied himself with tremendous
intensity. ‘While studying at the Conservatory
[…] I learned very quickly. If [Goldenweiser]
assigned me two Preludes and Fugues
by Bach on a Tuesday to be ready and
memorized for Friday, I was able to.
I remember I once needed to learn the
Eighth Sonata of Scriabin very fast,
which I had never heard played or seen
the score to. I learned it in four days,
a record for me’ (interview, Moscow
23 January 1946, Pianists in Discussion,
ed. M. Sokolov [Moscow: 1984]).
His graduation repertory
(1911) scaled the awesome. ‘The
rules then were that the whole programme
should be prepared no more than two
to three months before graduation and
Goldenweiser adhered to these rules
[…] my graduation program included not
only the 48 Preludes and Fugues by Bach
[…] but also a Handel Concerto in Stradal’s
transcription, an Adagio by Mozart [B
minor], Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor,
the Fourth Sonata of Scriabin, then
Franck’s Prelude Choral and Fugue, then
Rachmaninov’s [new] Third Concerto,
all prepared in a very short time.’
In 1913 Feinberg went
to Berlin, his first trip abroad. ‘He
nurtured the hope of meeting Busoni
and of possibly becoming his pupil.
Busoni was famous in Moscow as a pianist
and teacher - having taught in the city
[1890-91] - and, equally, as a composer
and philosopher, largely because of
his book Sketch of a New Esthetic
of Music [1907] which had been warmly
received by young Russian composers
such as Arthur Lourié. Unfortunately
for history, and for Feinberg, the great
maestro was not in Berlin during these
weeks in the spring of 1913, and Feinberg
had to be content [!] with auditions
for Schnabel and Lamond’ (Sirodeau,
2004).
The following year
he gave the first public performance
in Russia of the complete Forty Eight.
Only after conscription, illness, and
the Revolution, however, did he embark
definitively on a concert career. For
well over a generation he was to be
associated with the Forty Eight
(repeated in 1923, 1938-39, 1940), Beethoven
sonata cycles (from 1941), the Schumann
and Scriabin canon (the latter for the
first time in 1925), Prokofiev and Debussy.
On 22 March 1925, with the orchestra
of the Theatre of the Revolution under
the Armenian Konstantin Saradzhev [Saradzhian],
professor of conducting at the Conservatory,
he gave the first Soviet performance
with orchestra of Prokofiev’s Third
Concerto. ‘A genuine sensation’, in
Boris Schwarz’s words. The same year,
already with some of his compositions
published by Universal Edition of Vienna,
he appeared at the ISCM Festival in
Venice, playing his progressively informed,
cyclically-organised Sixth Sonata. Later,
in Berlin in 1927, he became one of
the first musicians of the century to
broadcast ‘live’ on radio.
Increasingly successful
in Europe up to 1929, his ascent ceased
with the Stalin purges of the late 1930s.
‘At this time […] his friend and editor
[the Taneiev disciple] Nikolai Zhilyayev
(who had been his [private] composition
teacher before 1914) was imprisoned
in the context of the Tukhachevsky affair’
(Sirodeau). (Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Red
Army marshal, executed 11/12 June 1937
on being sentenced in the secret trial
of the ‘Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military
Organisation’. Zhilyayev ‘perished’
the following year.
Subsequent to this
chapter, Feinberg’s only permitted future
excursion West was a visit to Brussels
in June 1938, to sit on the jury of
the second Ysaÿe International
Musical Contest - won by Emil Gilels;
Michelangeli coming controversially
seventh. Never a member of the Party,
conscious of the fragility of his place
as a Jew in an anti-Semitic society
(notwithstanding the award of a Stalin
Prize in 1946), black-listed with Shostakovich,
Prokofiev and Khachaturian in Zhdanov’s
1948 cultural purge, he spent the rest
of his life within Communist confinement.
In 1956 heart trouble forced his retirement
from the stage.
Heavy moustache, Russian-goatee,
hair swept back, high forehead, visually
Hans Keller-ish in his middle years
- immediately recognisable, ‘his face
[…] unlike anyone else’s’ (Prokofiev).
A stern but quiet cosmopolitan. Musically
and politically non-conformist, antipathetic
to proletarian/social realist order.
Disinclined to play his music in public
in the wake of the negative response
to the aesthetic tone underlining the
first of his three piano concertos -
premiered under Coates in 1932. An artist
drawn increasingly towards the unassailability
of Bach and pure polyphony. The bachelor
professor of the Moscow Conservatory
(1922-62), ever working at his technique.
Guardian and goldsmith of the Russian
piano tradition in all its many-coloured
guises - along with Flier, Gilels, Ginsburg,
Goldenweiser, Igumnov, Milstein, Neuhaus,
Oborin, Shatskes, Sofronitzki and Zak.
22 October. Liszt’s
birthday, Feinberg’s death. To Dmitry
Paperno (Notes of a Moscow Pianist,
Portland: 1998) Artistry and mastery
are inseparable ‘was the creative
credo of this unique musician. October
1962, the Grand Hall of the Conservatory
- the civil funeral of Samuil Evgenievich
Feinberg. The last visual impression
of him - the frozen noble features,
the aquiline nose, imperial: Cardinal
Richelieu. It seems only a lace jabot
is missing for a complete resemblance.’
Aside from an eight-page
article, ‘Style of Performance’, published
in Soviet Music in February 1961,
Feinberg’s essential writings and philosophies
appeared only posthumously - principally
a book Pianism as Art (Moscow:
1965, still to be translated fully into
English), judged by some to be superior
to Neuhaus’s Art of Piano Playing.
Beliefs bared to the
bone. ‘Conscientious control of the
fruits of the imagination’ is good.
‘Over-analyzed art where all the
elements are deftly calculated and a
theoretician is the sole tsar of the
creative process’ is bad. Feinberg’s
words are the clue to his mind and intuition*:
(a) ‘Transcription
leads to deeper modifications that
somewhat deviate from the exact
adherence to the author’s original.
Such changes are logically caused
by the features of another instrument
or instrumentation system. Thus,
some changes in the text are unavoidable
in a transcription. However, it
is difficult to find an example
of a successful intervention of
a performer into the notes of a
composer. The reality of concert
performances and quite often of
editions by famous pianists demonstrates
that even a small deviation from
the author’s text, addition of even
one extra note into a chord, a change
in figuration or other detail typically
distort the composer’s intentions.
Most frequently such "improvements"
show that performer does not have
the complete grasp of the author’s
style.’
(b) ‘The only
area where a pianist has the right
to introduce creative corrections
to the author’s style is that of
transcriptions and arrangements.
However, even in this domain one
should avoid unnecessary deviations,
extraneous rhetoric of invented
passages and ornaments that violate
the composer’s style. The goal of
a transcription is to express the
character of the sound of the original
by other means while retaining the
style of the composition as much
as possible. This is impossible
to accomplish mechanically. One
has to know well the possibilities
of his instrument, as well as find
creatively the adequate forms of
presentation and new means of _expression
to shed light on the composer’s
intentions. The new avenues of presentation
and _expression are needed solely
in order to preserve, not break
apart the very concept of the work.’
(c) ‘No matter
how we treat transcriptions and
arrangements for other instruments
it is impossible to deny that many
examples of this genre have the
right to exist and are themselves
a special kind of creative interpretation.
There is also no doubt that the
border that separates composition
and performance occupies to a certain
extent the domain of the composer’s
art.’
(d) ‘If we imagine
the entire path of a composition,
from its origins to its completion
in a real interpretation, we see
a line passing from infinity, through
the finite elements of the written
score, and back to infinity. The
original stimuli of art are infinitely
complex, the sound elements that
need to be written as notes are
finite, and the number of interpretations
that appear out of them is endless.
Performance depends on an uncountable
number of reasons and conditions.
Performing style changes with the
tastes and moods of the times, responding
to new audiences' demands. Each
new performer introduces special,
individual qualities into his playing.
Therefore it is extremely difficult
to fix the character of any performance
in strict and precise terms. The
author himself envisions the inevitable
variability of future performances
of his composition. He equips his
work with detailed directions to
the performer, striving to avoid
the total dissipation of his intentions
in the numerous individual interpretations
to come. However, two difficulties
arise. The composer understands
that restricting the performer's
will and freedom of interpretation
hinders the natural _expression
of the artist-performer. [Then there
is] the dichotomy between pre-imagined
ideas of sound, and the realized
work. This dichotomy treacherously
awaits both the composer and the
performer throughout the entire
creative process. It is easy to
make a mistake as to future interpretation
while sitting at one’s desk, writing
down and playing the work in one’s
mind. Introducing tempo markings
and shadings, the composer either
recalls his own playing or imagines
the ideal effort of a performer-interpreter.
In both cases his imagination can
mislead him, presenting only a partial
rendering of the actual performing
process - which depends on various
factors: the creation of sound,
overcoming technical difficulties,
and most importantly - the possibilities
and restrictions of a concrete instrumental
style.’
(e) ‘The flow
of an imagined sonic thread follows
its own rules and principles, and
is not necessarily identical to
real sound. Imagined sounds are
somehow lighter independent of the
technical, material aspects in playing.
Notes stressed in the author's mind
may not need to be played any more
loudly: it suffices for the composer
to stress them in his own mind.
An accent stressed in the realm
of the imagination may not always
be transferred adequately to performance.’
(f) ‘Regarding
the creative freedom of a pianist,
one should underline the need for
a musical image that is nurtured
by the mental ear. Reading of the
score should come before the production
of sound. Each note should be first
heard in the mind and only later
realized. Then the pianist's playing
becomes a creative act that turns
the world of musical images into
actual sound. The music lives before
and after the actual sound, in constant
development. The musical memory
connects the preceding sounds with
their later development, joining
the future and the past, and creating
the image of a whole musical form.
The charm and poetry of a solo performance
are in the fact that the transition
from inner image to real sound is
achieved by the individual will
of an artist. The performer's art
blends the inner life of a musical
image and the external form of sound.
The elastic reality of art and its
shadow are synthesized in a united
creative process.’
(g) ‘The dynamics
of artistic will play an enormous
role in the development of a performer’s
artistic self, but they should not
be identified with thoughtlessness
and a careless wish for on-stage
elation. One should not merely live
and feel in art, one has to live
through a great deal and endure
a great deal.’
(h) ‘[An] evolving
performing art is less durable than
the composition itself. A fruit
tree’s flowers come and go every
spring, but the tree itself may
live for centuries.’
(i) ‘The calling
of a performer, positioned between
the realms of imagined sound and
real sound, is to penetrate both
worlds simultaneously. He cannot
miss any shade of the music sounding
in his mind while listening, carefully,
to the actual sound elements he
brings to life. A performer’s vision
is not translucent to the outside
world. It is fogged, as he follows
the interior image and his attention
concentrates on realizing his ideas.
The violinist’s head turned toward
the instrument expresses symbolically
the essence of the performing craft.’
(j) ‘It is commonly
objected that the path of a creative
artist is different from the usual
conscious behavior of man, that
it is built of unconscious, intuitive
acts, like the path of a lawless
comet in the "predictable circle
of planets". However, much can be
accounted for in the domain of artistic
instinct: a constant, stable logic
of artistic interactions can be
found, just as a comet’s orbit can
be marked on a map of the stars.’
(k) ‘One of
the greatest pianists [Anton Rubinstein]
once remarked that "The pedal is
the soul of the piano". Indeed,
the pedal allows the piano to exhibit
its most characteristic and pleasant
sides. It is quite natural that
the sounds that use the pedal are
the most "pianistic". No instrument
except for the harp possesses the
ability to prolong the sound passively,
on the vague border between the
still sounding and already silent.’
(l) ‘An artist
himself is a carrier of the ideas
and emotions of a composition. The
personality of the artist-performer
is united in the listener’s mind
with the images emerging from the
music. A performer, as an actor,
is responsible for the joy and grief,
love and hate, contemplation and
elation - the whole live musical
content. He concretizes it and makes
it real in sound.’
(m) ‘Soviet
pianism […] is fed by the grand
tradition of Russian pianism. […]
the tradition of our pianism has
been created first and foremost
by the greatest Russian composers-performers.
It suffices to recall such names
as Balakirev, Liadov, Rachmaninov,
Scriabin, Medtner, Prokofiev, Shostakovich
- and we see clearly that the main
stylistic accomplishments pass from
generation to generation, from one
great composer-pianist to another.’
* translated Lenya
Ryzhik, University of Chicago
Present evaluations
concentrate largely on the calibre of
Feinberg’s thinking and teaching, and
the positive aspects of his work as
composer and pianist. Allan Evans, for
instance, writes: ‘When listening to
Feinberg interpret Bach, Scriabin, Beethoven,
or others, it is difficult to imagine
that one pianist can adopt such varied
approaches. Feinberg seemingly transformed
himself to draw forth the unique musical
language of each composer. His recording
of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier
[…] is probably the most musically compelling
and original version ever documented,
as is his Scriabin and Liszt playing.
He stands above all later Soviet pianists,
except Sofronitsky, as a foremost musical
mind and soul’. Carl Engel (Musical
Quarterly, 1924) wondered if he
might not be a ‘genius’. His performance
of Scriabin’s mystic ‘blue’ Fourth Sonata
was apparently regarded by the composer
to be among the best he’d ever heard.
Admiring Feinberg,
his musicality and brand of Busoni/Brendel/Gould
intellect, is one thing. Liking
what he represented, accepting
the paradox that thinker and performer
did not always meet at the same table,
another. As a girl at the Conservatory,
Nelly Akopian-Tamarina, last of the
Goldenweiser line, found him in old
age ‘aloof and unapproachable’, contrasting
the relative accessibility of his peers.
Over thirty years earlier, in 1927,
in the nearest we have to a ‘visualisation’
of the man and his personality at that
time, Prokofiev noted in his Soviet
Diary†:
Friday 21 January.
‘Feinberg’s approach [to the
Third Concerto] was so neurotic
and mannered it almost turned the
piece inside out. I wouldn’t have
thought there was anything "neurotic"
about my Third Concerto.’
Saturday 22 January.
‘Feinberg was at [my] rehearsal.
He knew I was playing my Third Concerto
and came to listen jealously as
to how I did it. This bothered me
slightly […].’
Sunday 23 January.
‘His playing is unbelievable,
emotional in the most exhibitionist
way: he breathes noisily through
the nose, bends right down over
the keyboard and makes a long-drawn
issue of every note. In short he
doesn’t play, he suffers. And it
becomes embarrassing for the audience
to watch him subjecting himself
to such torture.’
† translated Oleg
Prokofiev, London: 1991
Not all will respond
comfortably to this new Arbiter release.
In underlining Feinberg’s neuroticism,
the raw display of his emotions, Prokofiev
had a point. From the playing before
us he seems to have been something of
a tidal ebb-and-flow pianist. An artist
drawn to re-creation through individualized
rhapsody and quasi extemporisation,
his rhythm and timing dependent more
on context and underlay than bar-line
or stylistic consideration. Broadly
speaking, his Bach preludes emphasize
freedom of _expression and impulse,
while his fugues are stricter - though,
bending to contrapuntal and climactic
tension, still not without a variability
of tempo that can oscillate between
free rein and no rein at all. Occasionally
I find this inclination towards haste,
conversely holding back, destabilizing
and counter-productive, the apparent
readiness to let the music run away,
the lapses into rough, imperfect delivery
or deliberated hiatus, unexpected. Fodder
for the Brigade of Baroque Practitioners
to be sarcastic. On the other hand the
shaping and articulation of subjects
and answers, the textural voicing, the
seeing-through of lines, is evidently
logical and thought through - paradoxically
lean and muscular even when the surrounding
environment is not.
Best among the three
big fugal forays is probably the A minor
(stereo). Liszt’s version of the G minor
sets off at a brisk pace not fully sustained,
the left-hand octave work under strain
(at a duration of 9:15 compare with
Wild’s 11:12). Feinberg’s posthumously
printed transcription of the E minor
organ Leipzig Prelude and Fugue (stereo)
comes across with intermittent grandeur
but in the end succumbs to restlessness
(the playing times at 11:17, contrasting
Roscoe at 13:24 - who at this speed
achieves the steadier, more penetrating
realization notwithstanding a touch
of matronly starch in the Fugue). Of
the two other Bach items, the three-part
A major Sinfonia needs focus. But the
D major Toccata coheres to splendid
effect (exemplarily even scales,
buoyant closing jig, at seventy-plus
Feinberg’s fingers as super-drilled
as ever) - once you accept that the
final element of each tremolandi
will be paused (and accented); that
in the first Allegro the quavers
will be at one base speed, the semiquavers
at another (faster); and that each cadence
(transient or final) will be broadened
or spelt out.
Among the Romantic
tracks, the Liszt Consolations,
stylistically and expressively, spin
a lost fairy tale. Delicate cameos of
remembrance more flowingly ‘on the sleeve’
than the Rachmaninov Preludes - which
inhabit an uneasy climate, maybe because
of the anxieties of tempo and ‘over-pointing’
at play. Arresting though much of the
subsidiary voicing maybe, the F sharp
minor, for example, marked Largo,
is taken at 2:41 (cf Gavrilov’s
4:38 or Stott’s 5:14), agitated by a
fiercely (?exaggeratedly) accelerating
middle section.
The opening seven bars
of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade spell out
many of the traits of the Feinberg manner.
Emphasizing ‘con moto’ at the expense
of ‘andante’, the music moves throughout
in fits and starts, maintaining a broad
barline or phrase-length pulse but through
short, tense curves speeding up and
slowing down. A nauseous rubato. Unquestionably
the stentorian baritone entry at bars
90-92 (4:25) is as glorious as you get.
But the clipped upbeats, bars 169ff,
the frantic, bumpy stretto, bars
198ff, and the scramble of the closing
pages are not.
Freneticism rides rampant
in Scriabin’s single-movement Fifth
Sonata of 1907. Objectively, this is
a messy, even frightful, performance,
more an approximation than a realization
of the text. Feinberg hurtles home at
a hectic 10:09 - breathing the high-altitude
air of worlds removed from Ashkenazy
(11:45), Sofronitzky, the composer’s
son-in-law (12:12), or Gould (13:10).
You won’t find much detail here, little
attempt to ‘colour’ sound as Scriabin
inferred through his markings. Dynamics,
often reversed or ignored, are wild
and willful; elsewhere so subtle as
to elude the (presumed amateur) microphoning,
sometimes so crude as to ‘clip into
the red’ in showers of crackling distortion
- made worse by 78 rpm acetate grooves
long ago worn out.
Subjectively, on the
other hand, it’s epic - a psychologically
compelling journey into ‘excessive neurosis’.
Feinberg grips the structure through
violently opposed tempi. Despairingly
slow, dramatically fast. Languido
transmuted into lacrymoso, Allegro
impetuoso con stravaganza/Presto
translated into manic hallucinatory
delirium. Inner voices metamorphosed
into disquieting shapes emerging from
and fading back into eery shrouds of
smoke and occluded light. Misterioso
passages disturbed into agitato
ones. Prolonged rits, fevered
accels. The fantastic become
bizarre. Illusion above reality. The
music’s Ecstasy superscription,
the key to the re-creative vision:
I call you to life,
You hidden aspirations
You, buried in the
dark depths
Of the creative
spirit,
You timorous
Embryos of life
I bring you
Audacity!
Feinberg’s reasoning
explains Feinberg’s way‡. In ‘The Composer
and the Performer’, he refers revealingly
to ‘the contradictions between
Scriabin's performance markings and
his own interpretations in concert recitals’.
He speaks of ‘the dreamy images
of Chopin, Schumann, and Scriabin that
sometimes lie outside the boundaries
of real sound’. And he asserts,
from deep-founded conviction, that ‘the
score of a composer is not a marching
order "to be performed!"’ (my italics).
A performer must
resolve the entire depth of the ideas
contained there. How often carefully
notated shadings, accents, tempo changes
reveal not simply a positive characteristic
of sound but rather the untold sides
of the author's concept. How many directions
we find in Schumann, Chopin, Scriabin,
even Beethoven, that a pianist should
follow not in a real sound but by addressing
the subtlest hints to the imagination
of a listener! The observations of composers
performing their works are instructive;
the phrasing in their own performances,
following their own directions, often
turns convex lines into concave, the
prescribed tempo and dynamic markings
are violated. Such substitutions may
only be explained by the dominance of
the author's imagination over the actual
sound.’
‘Refracting’ (his word)
a composer’s ‘directions and shadings’
was the essence of Feinberg’s art. ‘Each
shade should become an inseparable part
of a particular organically united interpretation,’
he observes elsewhere (‘The Style’).
‘A composer’s instruction should not
become a foreign impulse that simply
makes a performer play sforzando
at a given moment’.
‘[One must of] necessity
distinguish between the text and the
performing directions, as a non-critical
and overly literal adherence to the
latter may detach the music from the
composer’s intentions […] an artist-performer
often confesses to himself that in order
to preserve a composer’s ideas one has
to deviate from an exact execution of
his directions.’
‘One may assume
that the [old] creative improvisation
method denied in modern composing practice
has moved completely into the domain
of performing art. A true virtuoso performing
compositions by others "must improvise".
Many pianists consider a thoughtful,
logical completion of a creative idea
to be incompatible with inspired artistic
playing. Firmness and conviction of
the performer in his chosen way is often
confused with hollow study. Such a "craftsman"
performance is left to the "low" of
the artistic world who lack true talent
and genius.’
‡ Ryzhik’s translation,
adapted
Unknown and private
recordings from Samuil Feinberg, legendary
composer-pianist of the Soviet old guard.
Ates Orga
Some useful Feinberg links
Feinberg ‘The
Composer and the Performer’
Feinberg ‘The
Style’
Feinberg Interview,
23 January 1946
Powell, Jonathan, The End of an Era,
International Piano, Vol. 5 No.
14, Winter 2001, pp. 36-42
Sirodeau, Christophe, biographical
note, 2003
Sirodeau, Christophe, Complete solo
Bach-Feinberg Hyperion
transcriptions liner notes, 2004
[Log-in required]
Samuil Feinberg (piano) 
