Cristofori Gets an Upgrade

For the past few months I've been diligently working on this lovely piece of music called Cristofori's Dream by the composer/pianist David Lanz. I can play it beginning to end--all nine pages--from memory, and have been filing in the rough patches and potholes.

But for some reason, I couldn't make it sound as good as when Mr. Lanz plays it. I know this is to be expected--after all I'm still pretty much a beginner-- but it seemed to me many of his chords were throatier, and some of the musical passages had a lot more going on in them than the version I was playing.

So I made an investigation. I went to his website where I discovered there were TWO versions of Cristofori's Dream: and one is called the CD Version. I whipped out my credit card, a minor purchase of $3.50 and I downloaded the nine-page epic. And sure enough, it is a whole 'nother ball game.

Large sections of the piece remain unchanged, but the passages which caught my ear's attention were, indeed, augmented with extra notes and embellishments. Furthermore, the long runs of octaves had an added third note --just like Joplin's The Entertainer--which added that "Throat" I kept hearing; a more emphatic voice in spots I couldn't reproduce no matter how I accented the notes. Furthermore, there's more direction, pedal notation, additional dynamics and other embellishments to help express the composer's intention.

It is a more difficult play, but I have most of the piece already learned. I just have to work on the embellishments and learn a couple of extra passages. But how cool. I thought I was almost finished, and was a little disappointed at how it sounded, when i discover added depths to a piece I thought I already knew.