Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Slipped-Disc on Maurizio Moretti

I stumbled upon this article and I was quite surprised by this. I am also surprised that there has not been any updates or new reporting on this matter.

I checked two of the CDs that were in dispute, and it seems these are still available online for purchase?

Brahms CD

Tchaikovsky CD

From Moretti's website, nothing is listed at the moment?

Does anyone know what is the full story here?

Tchaikovsky's seasons are not particularly difficult pieces and are often used as training pieces for young musicians. Brahms ballades and intermezzi I played some when I was 16 and while these are challenging musically, the technical side is much less of a challenge. I think anyone who is a professional pianist or professionally trained will be able to handle these pieces with relative ease?

Just wanted to say, I think you're understating the difficulty of the Tchaikovsky. I don't radically disagree with you -- like, I wouldn't say it's on the level of difficulty of the Chopin Ballades -- but it's not far below. Several of them are pretty difficult, at least if we're talking about playing them very well rather than just 'sort of playing them,' and I'd say that almost all of them are at least "tricky."

I would agree that "anyone who is a professional pianist or professionally trained will be able to handle these pieces" but not necessarily "with relative ease," and that quite a few would be somewhat limited in what they could do musically because of the technical demands of several of the pieces.

When I was a kid we all had to do these Tchaikovsky Seasons, and my piano teacher once held a concert for us to play the entire work among 6 of us, with ages ranging between 8-14. None of us were piano prodigy by any means, but we did the job and all played from memory. None of us played any scherzos or ballades by Chopin until we were much much older and more technically proficient. By the time we were all teenagers, most of us have learned at least half of the Seasons by Tchaikovsky, and if you had to learn the whole work later as an adult, it is really a lot easier because you had done a lot of these before.

Of course, a professional recording would require a much higher standard, but I really think the technical demands of this work is very minimal for a properly trained professional pianist. Many professional pianists would have several piano concertos under his/her repertoire, and the technical and musical demands of these works would far exceed that of the Seasons by Tchaikovsky.

We are also talking about studio recording here, and retake and correcting wrong notes etc... won't be difficult with the technology we have in any case.

If this story is true, which it seems to be, really calls into question how often this type of fraud has happened. How many other "not well known" pianists have tried this? Interesting thought.

If you look at Slipoed-disc, the article has been updated to include a suspect concerto played with an orchestra. Guess I am very naive, but couldn’t the orchestra confirm that the recording had been made or not?

Two words, Milli Vanilli.

I think this would only work if the recording didn't take place at all.

If the same orchestra did do recording for two different artists then we will need to check when the recording was made and released.

I had a look at Moretti's recording on youtube, I have to say I am not at all impressed with his playing... I lost interest after a few seconds of his Arabesque by Schumann, it just came as rather clumsy and rushed and lacked poetic beauty in my opinion.

I heard him playing live in concert. It was ok. He plays well enough but it wasn't phenomenal. Which is fine of course. He has good facility and shouldn't need to fake a recording.