Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Recording of Cortot's Masterclasses

http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000BC8T8C/

There is an hour worth of sound samples there... Cortot talks and plays excerpts... If only I knew French...

I got this CD recently. I, too, don't understand French so it was of limited interest. The big problem with it is that you don't hear any of the students' playing. All you hear is Cortot's playing with his comments. So you don't get what he is really trying to get across for the students. Some of the pieces he plays were apparently ones he never made a complete recording of. Be prepared to hear some pretty sloppy playing, too.

I already did (hear some sloppy playing)...

I was mainly interested in hearing Cortot play some stuff that he didn't record... I found the Mozart and Beethoven excerpts interesting, and wish he had recorded their works in the 20s and 30s... (I'm not getting the set, what with my Frenchless tongual capabilities, or Frenchy lingual incapabilities, but some of the excerpts are more than worth hearing.)

I heard that the booklet contains a translation of Cortot's words. Is this true?

oh come on, it's simple french :p


Thanks a lot for this link Antonius i listened to all of them. It's very interesting

I think Tavner would have mentioned that...

PS. All spoken French is too difficult for me (if it's written, I can run it through one of those very useful translation programs (perhaps I should perform some relevant study in phonetics in order to turn French speech into text... hmm...)).

Just learn to take those automatic translation programs with a big grain of salt. Some of the atrocities they produce are laughable - as long as people don't take them to be bona fide translations.

Regards,

Well, they are always pretty bad in anything but scientific French, but they do change the endeavour from too difficult to just a bit difficult and a bit unreliable (if we're talking about French (I've also used them to translate Japan into English, rather successfully (though I've encountered some colloquialisms that are just too weird to decipher, though that will happen rather easily with almost any language, I would imagine)).

"they are always pretty bad in anything but scientific French,"

In the case the above doesn't mean what I thought it would mean, I meant: they are always pretty bad in everything, save scientific French.

I have the CD and indeed there is a translation. I found it really interesting to hear his comments, in particular about Beethoven.

Well, hooray!