# 20th-century composers playing their own works



## WNvXXT (Nov 22, 2020)

cheregi said:


> If anyone has any more favorite examples of 20th-century composers playing their own works, or decently-listenable recordings from the early 20th century which preserve now-archaic playing styles, they would be much appreciated!


^ this is from in the _What solo piano music floats your boat?_ thread.






Szymon Goldberg, violin
Paul Hindemith, viola
Emanuel Feuermann, cello


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)




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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

^No.2 in A minor was marked "allegretto" by the composer, and he played it at that tempo. But everyone today plays it much slower.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Hindemith again:


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

Thanks for spinning this off into its own thread!



hammeredklavier said:


> ^No.2 in A minor was marked "allegretto" by the composer, and he played it at that tempo. But everyone today plays it much slower.


These sounds shockingly lifelike for piano rolls, I had to check to make sure that was what I was hearing... thanks for sharing them!






Sorabji playing Sorabji - but I've read that he stopped practicing earlier in his life and was regarded as a sloppy interpreter of his own works. Honestly my favorite thing about this video is the, what I hear as, disdainful tone of the announcer at the beginning.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

One really interesting one to explore is Shostakovich playing his own piano music. He does not approach it like others. Similarly for Debussy playing Debussy. 

Rachmaninov is always worth hearing and he recorded some of his own music.

Raynaldo Hahn singing Raynaldo Hahn is evocative - he smoked a lot. It isn’t Marcel Proust at the piano, and the recordings were not made in Proust’s cork lined bedroom. But I always like to pretend.

Elgar’s own recording of his second symphony is my favourite from the point of view of interpretation. 

(Are there any recordings of Busoni playing Busoni? He’s very good in Liszt.)

Michael Finnissy is certainly one of the better performers of his own music: Folklore and English Country Dances.


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

Percy Grainger playing Grainger is always worth a listen. He bangs through the twee Country Gardens like a Soviet tank regiment hammering through Kursk.




And his Molly on the Shore was a particularly sprightly lass.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Surely Britten deserves a mention here for many of his finest works.


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## vincula (Jun 23, 2020)

And so does Rachmaninov.






Regards,

Vincula


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

I suppose we should not include composers as conductors of their own music (there are too many)?

There are some recordings of George Benjamin playing his music. Then there is Holliger, a very great oboe player, playing his music, for example:

View attachment 153194


Jorg Widmann is a top class clarinet player but I have only heard him playing his own music from this:

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I'm sure there are others. The names will come to me in time!


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

Shosty plays his own piano concerti in daring, no-holds barred fashion, expressing the urgent angst of his circumstances.


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

Ives plays Ives:











What a character.

Feinberg plays Feinberg:






Medtner plays Medtner:






Enescu plays Enescu:


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

To show the variety out there for those interested in composers playing their own works -- two box sets currently in my disc collection:















The first box features piano music by (to quote from the list on the front cover) "Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, Engelbert Humperdinck, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Reger, Paul Hindemith, Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saens, Maurice Ravel, Igor Strawinsky, Darius Milhaud, Eduard Erdmann, Gabriel Faure, Francis Poulenc, a.m.o.", and that a.m.o. includes Bartok, Gershwin, Grieg, Prokofiev, and composers Dinu Lipatti and Vladimir Horowitz....

The second box features modern and contemporary composers (recorded between 1959 and 2002) conducting what are "live" recordings from Darmstadt. Composers include Earle Brown, Ernst Krenek, Bruno Maderna, Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Mauricio Kagel, Boulez, Michael Finnissy, Beat Furrer, a.m.o.

The difference between these two boxes is that there are many examples to compare to the piano performances in box one, while the recent orchestral pieces of box two may have had only the one recording that is in this box.

The great similarity is that both boxes present fascinating interpretations of music.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

There are quite a few recordings of Prokofiev, especially playing Prokofiev, and he was an incandescent virtuoso among other things.


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## Torkelburger (Jan 14, 2014)

A recorded video of Gershwin playing an arrangement of "I Got Rhythm". Nothing terribly virtuosic, but you can tell he's got some chops. Some nice "stride" style in there. Seems like he's rushing a little, though.


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

Debussy plays Debussy from piano scrolls:


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## Vasks (Dec 9, 2013)

Lukas plays Lukas


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## Vasks (Dec 9, 2013)

Thomas Ades plays his Op. 15


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)




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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

Stravinsky conducted just about all of his orchestral works on recordings, though there are many other conductors who are good in Stravinsky, and even some I prefer to Stravinsky's own recordings. Monteux, Bernstein, and Ozawa are good in Stravinsky; Esa-Pekka Solanen's recording of Stravinsky's _Violin Concerto_ that he made with Cho-Liang Lin is as vibrant as the one that Igor Stravinsky made with Issac Stern. A few years ago, I purchased on Amazon the complete (or almost complete) recordings of Igor Stravinsky conducted by the composer or played under the composer's supervision. Bare bones with no liner notes or lyrics/librettos, but a $22 for 22 CDs, how can you complain?









Like Stravinsky, Copland pretty much recorded his complete works, and I while I think Sony has released them all in a box set, I have a few _Copland-conducts-Copland_ individual CDs. The high point of the one below is the _Old American Songs_ that feature the rich baritone of William Warfield. Copland's recordings of his own works would be the only to go, except that Leonard Bernstein's recordings of Copland are also as great.









Speaking of Leonard Bernstein, HIS own recordings of his own works are the standard, but which ones: the Columbia recordings orr DG? I say the earlier Columbia recordings have the warmer and more robust sound.









Someone already mentioned Benjamin Britten whose own recordings of his own works are more-or-less definitive, not only because they feature the composer-as-conductor but because they also feature Britten's little family of musicians to which he composed his music for; and Britten state that he composed for people not instruments. So we have the Cello Symphony that he composed for Mstislav Rostropovich, the Piano Concerto that he composed for Stanislav Richter, and the many, many vocal works and lead opera roles that he composed for his partner, Peter Pears.









Not counting _They Are There_ featuring Charles Ives, Samuel Barber is the only major composer I know of to sing on a recording. If you start the clip below at 5:40 you will hear a young Barber singing his own _Dover Beach_ set the poem by Malcolm Arnold. Barber was only 20 when he composed it and he received praise from Ralph Vaughan Williams who had tried but could not set the poem to music to his own satisfaction.


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

chu42 said:


> Ives plays Ives:
> 
> What a character.


This Ives recording is _wonderful_!


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

For a real tour-de-force of 20th century composers, try Stravinsky's own recording of his _Les Noces (The Wedding)_ where he conducts the the ensemble which consists of Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Lukas Foss, and Roger Sessions on pianos: Five composers in one work!

View attachment 153244
View attachment 153245


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

If we are going for composers as conductors of their own music then the list will be very long indeed. Even if we just restricted it to composers who excelled at conducting the music of others we would get quite a long list.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

The great Richard Strauss conducting his own work.


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## Vasks (Dec 9, 2013)

Henry Cowell plays his own works:


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Korngold playing Korngold, beautiful music:


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

Just happened to be listening to this right now.





Only on an old Melodiya LP...
This needs to be reissued on a CD!


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

How about some 19th century composers playing their own music?

Anton Rubinstein playing Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky




Brahms playing Brahms




Grieg playing Grieg




Mahler playing Mahler




Khachaturian playing Khachaturian


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

Fabulin said:


> How about some 19th century composers playing their own music?
> 
> Mahler playing Mahler
> 
> ...


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

Sloe said:


> It can be said that piano rolls are exact recordings of how the player played at the moment of recording:


I always feel like piano rolls get kind of robotic-sounding in faster parts of the music, and even in the slower parts have a sense of off-ness, not enough to put a finger on but enough for them to just sound un-musical... but I may just be letting my preconceptions color my perception - there is of course the incident of Debussy listening to his piano roll played back and saying that it perfectly captured everything of his playing. On the other hand, it is equally certain that some of the earlier piano rolls are too obviously robotic and un-musical to be denied, and it's not clear that _all_ those issues were resolved in later versions. I would be very curious to run a blind test.


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

cheregi said:


> I always feel like piano rolls get kind of robotic-sounding in faster parts of the music, and even in the slower parts have a sense of off-ness, not enough to put a finger on but enough for them to just sound un-musical... but I may just be letting my preconceptions color my perception - there is of course the incident of Debussy listening to his piano roll played back and saying that it perfectly captured everything of his playing. On the other hand, it is equally certain that some of the earlier piano rolls are too obviously robotic and un-musical to be denied, and it's not clear that _all_ those issues were resolved in later versions. I would be very curious to run a blind test.


I would agree. Piano rolls are not 100% accurate reproductions-especially after being subjective to wear and tear.


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

cheregi said:


> I always feel like piano rolls get kind of robotic-sounding in faster parts of the music, and even in the slower parts have a sense of off-ness, not enough to put a finger on but enough for them to just sound un-musical... but I may just be letting my preconceptions color my perception - there is of course the incident of Debussy listening to his piano roll played back and saying that it perfectly captured everything of his playing. On the other hand, it is equally certain that some of the earlier piano rolls are too obviously robotic and un-musical to be denied, and it's not clear that _all_ those issues were resolved in later versions. I would be very curious to run a blind test.


Maybe it is in your head or maybe the person played a bit stiff if not always but because they were in a different environment or situation:

Complete Mahler on piano rolls:






I think it is a fascinating way of recording from a time when audio recordings were still in poor quality I would like to hear a complete orchestra roll recording just out of curiosity.

The person sat at the piano and was playing during the recording and how fast they played, their mistakes and how hard they pressed was recorded also their use of the pedals.


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

Sloe said:


> The person sat at the piano and was playing during the recording and how fast they played, their mistakes and how hard they pressed was recorded also their use of the pedals.


But I know, for example, that in terms of 'loudness' early piano rolls sorted performers' key-presses into a binary 'loud' or 'soft' category, rather than reproducing things in an 'analogue' i.e. non-discrete / infinite-gradations way, and I believe that as the technology advanced it was in the direction of introducing more and more subcategories of 'loud' and 'soft' rather than transitioning to a truly 'analogue' system...

If you have the inclination I highly recommend the early chapters of this online study for a closer look at the many impediments (including the idea you mentioned, of people playing a bit stiff because of unfamiliar situation) to gleaning useful information about performance practice from early audio and piano rolls.


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## Simon Moon (Oct 10, 2013)

Just under the 20th century wire...

Magnus Lindberg - Piano Concerto No. 1 (1999)


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