Tidbits


Yamaha and iPhone

Yamaha and two partners have developed an iPhone application that lets up to 10 people play a piano at the same time, among other features.

Finger Piano Share is an iPhone application that was developed by Japan's Densan System. The application, which is still under development, allows users to play songs using virtual keys displayed on the screen of an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Finger Piano Share uses a series of visual prompts to let users know what keys to press and when to press them.

The application can also be used to play a Yamaha MIDI-equipped piano that's connected to a computer with an Internet connection. When the user taps a key using Finger Piano Share, the note is played on the piano. Up to 10 people can use the application to play on the same piano.

Angela Hewitt’s New Recording of Well Tempered Clavier

March, 2009: BBC Music Magazine is hailing Canadian Angela Hewitt's latest release of the Well-Tempered Clavier as even better—"more wise and more thrilling"—than the recording she made ten years ago. She performs it on a Fazioli piano, vs the Steinway she used for her first recording of the 48. George Pratt, review for BBC Music Magazine stated, "her exemplary control of touch creates layered registers, a characteristic more usually associated with the fortepiano… Hewitt's second thoughts, enhanced by technically outstanding recording, hold me totally enthralled."Ms. Hewitt discusses the release in her own website. The CD, "Bach The Well-Tempered Clavier" is available in Canada.

For those who might be lacking background on this, the Well-Tempered Clavier is a collection of 48 preludes and fugues in al the major and minor keys. Book 1 was published in 1722 and the second book twenty years later. The cover, interestingly enough, contains not a series of meaningless squiggles, but Bach's interpretation of the tuning needed to produce the "well-tempered" tuning system he developed.

The term "clavier" refers not only to that instrument but to any keyboard instrument that Bach would have had available to perform.

WTCcover2
Cover of Bach’s original publication showing the interpretation of the tuning system Bach used.

Editor’s Update: I finally got my set of this in the fall of 2009. This collection is well worth purchasing. Angela Hewitt’s performances are excellent. She has been compared to Glenn Gould and as much as I enjoy Gould’s interpretation, Angela Hewitt’s performances are every bit as engaging.