Visitors to the Sorabji.com/Mark A. Thomas household tonight would have heard me practicing Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor, Op. 72, and Chopin's Etude, Op. 10 #1. (Click to listen with RealAudio)

I wonder if any pianists who played this Etude ever reached up with their left hand to hit that D Sharp on the fourth beat of measure 8?

It's sure tempting now that the idea has crossed my mind, but I don't think I'd do it. You'd need the pedal there to hold the octave on the bottom, but it's right at the spot where a quick change of pedal has to happen (even if it's not indicated in the score).

It would be almost Victor Borge-like to see someone hit that high E in Measure 48 with the left hand.

Har dee har har, but I do know how to amuse myself. I laughed about this while practicing tonight, imagining a pianist reaching up with the left hand to pluck all those unaccompanied high notes in this piece.

I think of the Op 10 #1 Etude as militaristic. I have played it since high school, but picked it up again recently after not touching it for many years. I'm going to work through all the Chopin Etudes between now and this summer. I decided to start with Op. 10 #1 from scratch, but got psyched out by it when I read that Horowitz considered it the hardest of all the Chopin Etudes. Horowitz himself never recorded it, and complained that Chopin would have changed many things about this and other of the Etudes if he had written them for a modern Steinway. (Like maybe he would have let the pianist grab that D-Sharp with the left hand, dammit...)

If Chopin would in fact have changed things around to fit modern pianos I wonder what he would have done with measures 30 and 32, 2 measures which I find impossibly awkward. I recently bought the Guiomar Novaes recordings of the Chopin Etudes (recordings which I grew up with but had not listened to in a long time) and hear that she muffed those 2 measures. I don't remember ever noticing that in high school when I listened over and over to her play the Chopin Etudes and Nocturnes.

It should be faster than I played it here. There should be more right notes, and the octaves in the bass should be more of a presence -- but I share an under-tempo recording because I've been thinking a lot about cheating in piano playing lately, since re-discovering that my digital piano allows for that. With this piano, as with most any digital being made, you can record something into the piano at a slow speed, then play it back at a faster speed without changing the pitch of the notes. It's like playing a 33-1/3 RPM record at 45 RPM, except that within reason it really sounds un-artificially faster.

I could record that recording of Chopin's 1st Etude, jack it up a few metronome markings and play it back at a speed greater than I am presently capable. Assuming I didn't get too greedy by increasing the speed to something unbelievable I could use the recording for a demo tape and chances are no one would know it was doctored.

I don't know how such a scenario sounds to anyone unfamiliar with the world of classical musicians, but I would not be surprised if this practice becomes common in the next several years. Forged demo tapes and artificial padding of performance resumes are common. I used to know a violinist who said I could pad my resume with fabricated concerts he and I performed, and he would do the same. He'd even let me use him as a reference, and he promised to say I was an outstanding pianist. This technique had helped him book concerts, he told me, and I was not surprised.

Even back in high school when I auditioned for a conservatory one of the conservatory faculty said that they had received a really exciting audition tape from a 14 year old. The playing was just immaculate, some of the most exciting and seasoned playing the faculty had ever heard, and from one so young!

They rejected the applicant without comment, it being painfully obvious that this was a forgery.

I used to find it hard to imagine that anyone who did something like that could expect to get away with it or, even if they did get their foot in some door, how could they expect to get anywhere?

But it could happen, and I guess it would be naive to think otherwise. Music is just another business, so what works in one business could be adapted to work in another. Go rent "The King of Comedy," a great Martin Scorsese film about a non-funny comedian who scams his way to the top of comedy world. I bet an artist could pull a similar scam, based largely on the premise that people believe things in a certain order: first they believe anything you tell them, then they believe only what they want to believe. Or is it the other way around? I can never remember.

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