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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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CD

April 5, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Legendary Piano Recordings: The Complete Grieg, Saint-Saëns, Pugno, and Diémer (Marston Records, two CDs). Edvard Grieg, the first composer of significance to make records, cut nine 78s of his own compositions for piano during a visit to Paris in 1903. One year later Camille Saint-Saëns made the first in a series of sixteen recordings in which he plays piano solos and accompanies a good violinist and a not-so-good mezzo-soprano. All these stupendously rare performances, plus other important piano recordings of similar vintage, have now been transferred to CD by Ward Marston in meticulously pitch-corrected versions. The sound may be primitive, but the interpretations come through with uncanny, even eerie clarity, and as you listen to Grieg rippling blithely through “Butterfly” or Saint-Saëns tossing off his “Valse nonchalante” with fey elegance, you will feel closer to the lost world of nineteenth-century pianism than you ever before thought possible (TT).

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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