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Looking into Rex Lawson, I discovered that this is a re-release of The Pianola Institute’s own first CD, given the catalogue number Aeolia 1001. This is out of print, put was produced in collaboration with the Other Minds Festival of California whose alternatively designed release is still available, though I’m not sure if supplies are that abundant.

The pianola is a strange and wonderful phenomenon, and takes numerous forms both in its technical functioning and appearance. Rex Lawson has long been one of the leading names associated with the pianola or ‘player piano’, and like Jürgen Hocker, has in the past worked with Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who singlehandedly brought the instrument into the light of 20^th century creativity. Hocker has been able to create a superb body of state-of-the-art recordings for the MDG label, but the production of this older recording is certainly of a very high standard. The University recital hall is fairly dry as an acoustic, but mechanical rumble from the machinery is very low in the aural picture even with the close microphone placement, and only featured ever so slightly when I listened through my second-mortgage headphones. The only other thing I noticed through repossession headphones was a slight tick here and there as if listening to a new LP. I have no explanation for this and pass it off as a very minor irritation; probably not noticeable in normal circumstances.

Collectors familiar with Stravinsky’s own rather abrasive 1959 recording of Les Noces might balk at the thought of this piece played on piano alone, and through a mechanical pianola at that. During the 1920s, the firm of Pleyel provided Stravinsky with a studio in its headquarters in the rue Rochechouart. He seemed virtually to live there for a while, being able to use it as an office, a studio for composition, and a workshop for creating new piano roll versions of most of his early works, as well as an environment away from not always the easiest of domestic circumstances. He made new arrangements of The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Song of the Nightingale and Pulcinella, as well as Les Noces. Rex Lawson’s pianola performance of The Rite of Spring appeared on an intriguing CD pairing, back to back with a slightly dodgy live recording with Benjamin Zander conducting the Boston Philharmonic with the same piece on IMP MCD 25. The attempt then was to restore Stravinsky’s original intentions in terms of tempo to the orchestral version, but with Les Noces the most intriguing thing for me is how the music is transformed into an almost entirely new and fascinating work. Shorn of wobbly singers and the extraneous colours of percussion and chorus, the pianola seems like a ‘soft’ alternative at first. All of the inventively angular melodic shapes and repetitions take on a different life however, and rhythmically the work generates a rich tapestry of contrasts. Some passages have a much more potent ‘groove’ than can be heard in the full scoring, and the relationship of this piece to the Rite jumps out more frequently as a result.

The ‘reproducing piano’ as it is called in the booklet notes, is a highly complex instrument. Looking at diagrams of a typical machine would seem to indicate that the ‘driver’ needs at least three of each limb. The player controls tempo, dynamics and pedals in a variety of ways, and anyone who imagines it’s just a question of turning a switch and waiting until the roll has finished needs to think again. Rex Lawson’s legendary technique turns Les Noces into a remarkably fresh sounding tour de force, making it easy to hear why Stravinsky was so enthusiastic about the potential for this medium for his own work. Any fan of Stravinsky, early or late, needs to hear this version of Les Noces.

The other works on this disc are all arrangements by Rex Lawson, and while the programme is a bit of a strange selection all of the pieces are unified by the virtuoso pianolist’s expertise and sensitivity of touch. Lutosławski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini covers a great deal of ground in its relatively brief time-span, from wide athletic leaps to lyrical legato, and is an ideal showcase for the reproducing piano. The same goes for the two-piano arrangement of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, although the familiarity of this piece as a technical extravaganza in numerous guises makes the ear forget the machine origins of the performance more easily somehow.

Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba is treated with a certain amount of artistic licence, and there is something going on in the treble between the two pianos which makes some passages sound like a turbo toy-piano. Such arrangements have plenty of legitimacy, and this is apparently one of Rex’s highly popular best-selling rolls. Widor’s Toccata from the 5^th Symphony for organ sounds fine here, but is the only one out of the pieces here which I felt might have benefited from a bit more wow factor in terms of tempo. All of those running figures sound a bit like a Czerny etude, and the ‘left hand’ rhythms end up a bit pedestrian. We know this piece well enough, so why not make it sound really ‘unplayable’. The final surprise is a clutch of movements from Pineapple Poll, tunes by Sir Arthur Sullivan, arrangement by Sir Charles Mackerras. This is all great fun as you might expect, but the penultimate movement Reconciliation also shows how wonderfully sensitive this mechanical reproducing thing can be when allowed to perform a real lyrical melody.

This disc is no mere novelty, and having this rare recording of Stravinsky’s own arrangement of Les Noces for pianola is something all serious collectors should consider. It would be a truly fascinating project to have as complete a set as possible of all of Stravinsky’s own pianola rolls, and there must surely be plenty of motivation for bringing them together on record. European readers keen on having a live demonstration are urged to visit the Amsterdam Pianola Museum, whose floor to ceiling stacked walls are a living symbol for the problems of storage and the benefits on insulation when it comes to piano rolls. Rex Lawson’s own well written notes for this release top off an attractive package which goes way beyond expectations at just about every turn.

Dominy Clements

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