During my holidays I spent three weeks in Holland and I have visited Chris on 14th of july. We have made a recording session. The product were 6 more Slavonic Dances: op. 46, no. 5 to 8 and op. 72, no. 1 and 8. We really have fallen in love with these pieces, because they all are so original and there are so much sweet and lovely melodies in them!
Of course, we have prepared our parts, but we only had one day to play piano together, so it was not so much time for six dances. For me the pieces were completely new and I seriously started to practise them just one week before I went to Chris, because before I had many other things to do for my job.
Nevertheless the end-effects are quite enjoyable from my view. After Chris has made the first audio-editing, I have done some few little cuts to delete a slip or wrong note, by the way. I have let in some few little flimsinesses to make sounding our recording a bit more "lifely" respective "humanly". (That´s what we are, human beings, isn´t it? ) As long as I take the correct passages I cut in from our own takes, I have not a bad consciousness concerning the cuts, because we show, that we are able to play these passages correctly. With the few cuts I´m just fighting a little bit against the lack of time we had to practise together.
It was last year, when Chris and me started to record Slavonic Dances by Dvorak together, we have recorded op. 46, no. 4 and op. 72, no. 2 and 4 then. So only the first three dances would miss to complete the first serie. (We also have recorded Mozarts sonata in f-major for piano four hands last year.)
Besides from recording Chris and me enjoyed three meetings of windsurfing this year. (I have to say, I´m not angry, that we did more windsurfing during these holidays than playing piano, though it´s a real pleasure to play with Chris together. ) You will get some impressions of our windsurfing while watching and listening to the video-recording of op. 72, no. 8 on my YouTube-page. I have put in there some hot scenes.
I have enjoyed this collaboration with Chris a lot (both, concerning music and sport). I think, we harmonize very well together at the piano.

We have video-taped three of the six pieces. I will give here the links to the three videos and below there are the mp3-files of all six Slavonic Dances. The audio-tracks of the videos are signed with "video" in the file-name, btw.

So, phew, after hours of video-editing I proudly present you Chris Breemer and Andreas Pfaul in: "Dvorak, Slavonic Dances"! Regie: CB&AP, Netherlands 2010, language: language of the whole world, camera: AP, audio-editing: CB&AP, video-editing: AP:)

Here are the links to the videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPZ6srLuXqk (Dvorak, Slavonic Dance, op. 46, no. 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HeSxTGVtTo (Dvorak, Slavonic Dance, op. 72, no. 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZn521eJVNA (Dvorak, Slavonic Dance, op. 72, no. 8 )

Here are the links to the files on PS:
Dvorak - Slavonic Dances Op.46 - 5: Allegro vivace (3:26)
Dvorak - Slavonic Dances Op.46 - 6: Allegretto scherzando (5:02)
Dvorak - Slavonic Dances Op.46 - 7: Allegro assai (3:07)
Dvorak - Slavonic Dances Op.46 - 8: Presto (4:21)
Dvorak - Slavonic Dances Op.72 - 1: Molto vivace (4:41)
Dvorak - Slavonic Dances Op.72 - 8: Lento grazioso, quasi tempo di valse (5:42)

Hi Andreas and Chris,

I especially enjoyed the Slavonic Dance, op. 72, no. 8 (smiley face).
The wind surfing images worked so well with the music.

Kaila

Hi Chris and Andreas,

I listened/watched the three videos and will return to the other audio files soon. These Dvorak dances are delightful to hear! You both play with fine coordination and complete musicality, and obviously enjoy the collaboration as well. I'm amazed too at how you learned these pieces in so short a time. The Gaveau sounds better than ever.

The wind surfing looked like a lot of fun, and you had a perfect day out on the water. I'm wondering if those kites aloft ever suddenly dive into the water and get caught on the keel of a surfer's sail board?

Looks like you had a fine time with the music and recreation.

David

Thanx David. Actually I had played these dances before, if not the Secondo parts, these I had to learn as well. Andreas learned all of it in a short time indeed - no mean feat.

Yes the Gaveau sounds better than before but I'm peeved about a couple of sour notes. The tuner/technician had been two days earlier but it turned out that what he had done was tensioning rather than full tuning. It's been properly tuned since then.


You have to watch out for them a bit. The experienced ones are no problem, they keep their kite high at all times and can move almost on the square meter. But the less good ones can drop their kite too low sometimes or have it laying in the water so that you can easily surf over their ropes. And with less wind all of them are annoying as they can't keep their kite up high properly.

Haha yes, an eight followed by a right parenthesis is automatically converted to a smiley by our super-intelligent bulletin board
That can be prevented by ticking the box 'Disable smilies' when composing the message.

Indeed some of our best moments are in this one I think. Actually the slower ones are more difficult to synchronize.
Thanks for the feedback !

Musicrecovery wrote:


Thank you for listening and your kind comment, Kaila. One of my YouTube-listeners also said, that the windsurfing-pictures fit very well to the music. I first thought, I should have choosen a faster movement, but on the other hand the quite slow and profound movement is a good counterpoint to the pictures. I´m very happy about your praise concerning the corelation of music and pictures, because for me that´s a quite important matter.

Rachfan wrote:


Dear David, thank you for your interest and praise, which means much to me. Indeed, we have enjoyed our collaboration and it was a great pleasure to play with Chris together. I also think, the sound of his Gaveau has improved. It´s clearer and brillianter now. But also the mechanique is in a very good state now. The only disadvantage was, that the discant got a bit out of tune, even Chris has let it tune shortly before our meeting. But that´s absolutely normal, when you have renewed all strings of a piano recently. It will disappear after a while and the piano will hold its tuning again as well as before.



Chris is absolutely right, with what he wrote about them above. When there is not so much wind, they are really annoying, because you always have to pay attention for them. When there is good wind, only the beginners can be annoying, when they drop there kite f.ex. There are special buoys for the kites, which mark their barriers, but they often don´t care for them and they surf very close to the beach.



Indeed, we had. It was a very nice time.

Hi Chris,

With restringing you have to be patient, as the piano will slip out of tune more quickly after a tuning than you're used to. Reaching stability can take up to a year or more. One thing I discovered, but too late, is to tune the the restrung piano slightly sharp to concert pitch. Putting that additional tension on the strings stretches them a little more quickly and can hasten achieving stability. I only wish I had tried that sooner, as I had to go well over a year waiting for "the day".

P.S. I figured those kites could be a hazard!

David

Yeah I know... not a prospect to be relished.


I think that is what he said he was doing. Right now, it still seems to be holding up fine (fingers crossed) and I like the 'new' sound more every day.

These are all up on the site now.

Hi Andreas and Chris,

well done!

The video on my PC has shape distortion, the vertical dimension being longer than the horizontal one so that the Gaveau looks like a small baby grand (we say un crapaud, a toad, in French). Is it because of my PC ?

Thanks, my friend.



I don´t know, if it´s your PC or may be your player-software. With Windows Media Player Classic it was shown very well in widescreen size like it was recorded originally by me. But with Nero Show Time and on YouTube it´s shown in a wrong format. I think, I have choosen also a wrong saving option in my video editing program, I didn´t choose "widescreen, 16:9" but "4:3". But on the other side the music is much more important than the screen size of the video.

Techneut wrote:


Thank you for having put them up!

No, not your PC. There's just something about the way these videos were saved.
Now, I won't kill you for saying my Gaveau looks like a toad. Because toads (as well as frogs) happen to be my favorite animals We have a lot of them in the garden and I love them all dearly.

Could be that Chris is right here. But why are they shown in a correct size then in Windows Media Player Classic For me that really has no logic then.