Wagner's WHAT?

[Ein Heldenleben]

Written scores? please see:: https://www.gramophone.co.uk/interna...mad-for-wagner

An extremely interesting article thanks for posting. As I surmised Lugansky had more or less worked out his Gotterdamerung transcription by playing from vocal scores and full score and just listening to the opera. For years they were never written down , He could clearly play them all from memory and they varied every time - pretty much what Liszt or more latterly Horowitz did. For a recording he needed to notate them - not something he had much experience of. He then used computer software and a friendly computer buff to create a score . He then found the score very diff to read and had to rely largely on muscle memory! Just proves what I’ve always thought even composer pianists (in fact especially them) rarely play the score to the letter.
in my only tIny way I rarely play vocal scores note for note - I adapt them to suit what my fingers can and can’t do. Of course when you have fingers like Lugansky that can do more or less anything the options are endless.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Well Heldenleben, I've no doubt Liszt and Wagner would disagree with me on many points. They lived before radio and CDs. I just feel an enormmous amount of work goes into making something that can only be a reflection, when you can have the original at the touch of a button.

As Bert says a transcription is an interpretation . A recording is not the “original”’. In some ways through multi miking , processing and editing it’s just as much a transcription as a piano version.

On a seperate note Luganksky has just played a quite sensational Chopin F Minor Ballade

[oliver sudden]

in my only tIny way I rarely play vocal scores note for note - I adapt them to suit what my fingers can and can’t do.

I would hazard a guess that that puts you in the company of the vast majority of people who have ever played from a vocal score! Those things (as you presumably know!) generally have an amount of material in them that puts them beyond the ability of almost (sometimes literally) anyone, and of course it’s rarely the best technically equipped pianists who find themselves deputising for an orchestra for the benefit of singers…

[Ein Heldenleben]

I would hazard a guess that that puts you in the company of the vast majority of people who have ever played from a vocal score! Those things (as you presumably know!) generally have an amount of material in them that puts them beyond the ability of almost (sometimes literally) anyone, and of course it’s rarely the best technically equipped pianists who find themselves deputising for an orchestra for the benefit of singers…

Could write a bit of a thesis about this . (Apologies if I’m teaching you to suck pianistic eggs ) So many vocal scores use tremolo to get around the awkward fact that the piano note decays immediately but tremolos aren’t easy and don’t appear in a lot of ABRSM pieces. The Breitkopf and Hartel Wagner scores try to get as much in as possible and are often a bit unpianistic , the Ricordi Verdi and Puccini scores are way easier. You can do a lot of faking in both though. Boosey and Hawkes Strauss scores esp Der Rosenkavalier can be borderline impossible. I don’t know how repetiteurs get through them - let alone keep an eye on the conductor,
Weirdly I find Mozart the most difficult of the lot - nothing lies under the fingers and the piano never sounds anything like a Mozart orchestra. However it’s worth picking through all of them as they MASSIVELY help with all sorts of other things - like sight reading and the ability to “colour “ the piano sound.