An Interview with Robert Silverman
For his recording of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas,
Robert Silverman employed the Bösendorfer 290SE Reproducing Piano, which is a nine-foot
Bösendorfer fitted with Wayne Stahnke's collection of sensors that measure all keyboard
and pedal activity and record it to a computer hard drive, where it can be edited. The
stored performances can be played back through the piano for recording at a later date, as
was done here.
This is not the mechanical sounding player piano technology
that everyone is familiar with from parlor piano-roll mechanisms. The sensors record touch
and duration with phenomenal accuracy, and listening to a Stahnke Reproducing Piano is
almost unsettlingly like hearing a ghost from the past, particularly when reproducing
virtuosos long since dead, as on the two discs of Rachmaninoff "re-enactments"
on Telarc (A Window in Time I & II, Telarc 80489 & 80491).
After Silverman and piano engineer Jim Turner had
determined that they were satisfied with the performances of all of the sonatas, John
Atkinson joined them to record the performances in 24-bit/88kHz hi-rez digital in a manic
three-day session.
Wes Phillips: Has anybody living used
this recording process before?
Robert Silverman: More than you know --
more than I know, too. For whatever reason, some people use it quietly without saying
anything about it. I found it a wonderful tool and I enjoyed using it.
WP: What are its advantages over a
conventional piano as far as you're concerned?
RS: There are so many -- ranging from the
sublime to the ridiculous. The most obvious is that, thanks to a grant, I had access to
it. The artistic advantage is that it allows you to make little adjustments. There are
always going to be wrong notes, that's just the nature of performing challenging material.
In the old days, the engineer would edit them out with a razor blade, these days you do it
with software, but the reproducing piano allows you to make little adjustments to create
an idealized performance.
Bosendorfer 290SE Reproducing Piano with microphone
array used for recording Robert Silverman's Beethoven cycle.
(photo by John Atkinson)
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Of course, there are things you can't do,
either. A really sharp editor can (and routinely does) splice together 32nd notes from
different performances on tape or a conventional digital recording. But splicing from two
or three takes on the reproducing piano is so cumbersome as to be impossible -- it would
take fifteen or twenty minutes per splice, which just isn't practical.
So what the piano forced me to do -- and I was happy to do
it this way -- was to play the piece straight through with no stops. I'd do a piece two or
three times and when I was happy with the overall musical shape of it, then I'd set to
work editing that. You get an idealized version of a performance, not something
that was compiled in the editing. When I realized that this was the ground rule, I was
extremely happy about it. These are performances that feel natural and not artificial.
WP: Would this be your preferred method
of recording now?
RS: If I could be assured of getting John
Atkinson to come into Aaron Mendelssohn's house and record it, sure. I don't know if
you've read John's article about recording the material (in the December, 2000 Stereophile),
but you can't move the piano.
WP: Is this transferable? Could you
perform on one reproducing piano and then record it from another?
RS: Yes, it's technically possible.
There's a regulation program you run that assures that the piano is operating correctly.
Play something back on an un-regulated instrument and it could sound like bloody hell, but
assuming the piano is professionally maintained and regulated properly, it's amazingly
accurate.
The exhilaration Jim Turner and I felt as we began to
realize the sonatas were coming out so well is my biggest memory. And the terror I felt
when John was actually recording them -- we only had a weekend and a day to record and it
just didn't seem like enough time. John got his mikes set up rather quickly, but it still
took a long time to get the routine going. Friday night came and we'd only gotten about an
hour on tape. We were fortunate to be in a relatively quiet environment. Of course, there
were airplanes and cars, which required re-recording, but since I wasn't doing the
playing, we could repeat things as much as necessary.
Except once -- we just couldn't seem to get a take we liked
of one passage. It was noisy or we didn't get the voicing we wanted or whatever, so, in
frustration, John made me sit down and actually play it. It took a few tries to get it
right.
At first I wasn't even going to mention the piano -- it was
just a tool we used, and I was afraid that people might perceive it as a gimmick. But now
I'm glad we're letting everyone know about it. It'll never replace conventional recording
-- there are only 32 of these reproducing pianos and they're not going to make any more. I
felt extraordinarily privileged to record this way -- and it was remarkably easy on me,
unlike conventional recording. It is a wonderful tool: it allowed me to spend the time I
needed to archive the performances I wanted and then record them in an extremely short
period of time.
It allowed me to concentrate on my musical conception of
these works -- and, at this stage of my life, I have one.
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