October 23, 200817 yr Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed this... quite a bit. Odd since I attempted listening to the real 5th symphony and didn't last more than three minutes. I guess I'm just a sucker for piano. It really is a shame Mahler never wrote anything real for the piano. I might actually be a Mahler fan if he did.
October 23, 200817 yr I actually thought tht that recording was fake..I've seen the youtube video many times actually though. But maybe it is real..
October 25, 200817 yr Ahh..it seems believable now. Anyway..just knowing that that could actually be Mahler just excites me beyond belief. Too bad he didn't do a piano reduction of another one of his symphs..the 5th is like 5th in my list of favorite Mahler's symphonies, lol.
November 14, 200817 yr Mahler plays Mahler.... it seems more exciting than it really is. Keep in mind that these are only piano roll reproductions of Mahler's playing and the piano roll is a medium with a deservedly bad reputation. I have always been highly suspicious of piano roll recordings like these, for piano rolls have been shown to be unable to capture all nuances, shadings and subtleties of the original playing. The Welte-Mignon player piano system for which Mahler's rolls were made was only able to approximate the dynamic nuances and tempo shadings, which is why some of the greatest pianists sound devoid of color and imagination on piano rolls. Moreover, the rolls were usually heavily edited after the pianist had recorded the roll: dynamics were added separately to some special coding channel, often done by someone other than the pianist who had recorded the roll. So at best, these piano rolls only give a fair impression of what Mahler's piano playing sounded like (and that alone makes it a very valuable, historic document), but it's not the same as listening to Mahler's actual piano playing.
November 15, 200817 yr Sounds like a lot of nitpicking to me. Well, regardless of the technicalities of recording, the fact that we can get just a glimpse of Mahler playing his own work is simply fascinating, wouldn't you say? A hundred years from now, people might be laughing at the poor quality of digital recording that we make today, LOL!
November 15, 200817 yr Sounds like a lot of nitpicking to me. Well, regardless of the technicalities of recording, the fact that we can get just a glimpse of Mahler playing his own work is simply fascinating, wouldn't you say? A hundred years from now, people might be laughing at the poor quality of digital recording that we make today, LOL! Well, the comparison with MIDI has been mentioned, and if you wanted to compare it with something of our time, that would be a MIDI file, not a sound file/CD. Since the late 19th century it already was possible to make actual analog recordings on phonograph cylindres and while the quality wasn't extremely good of course, the dynamics and rhythms weren't distorted like in a piano roll "recording" such as this. So the point is actually not the lesser quality of old recordings, but the type of recording. I'm sure if you "recorded" a contemporary pianist on a MIDI file she or he wouldn't feel him- or herself accurately represented either.
