This is better especially that 4th movement 🔥

@@TheLifeisgood72 I tend to agree - I found the first movement a little unusual but I do wonder whether other performers listened to Scriabin himself playing (?) - a must, surely, if the recording is available??

@@billyfisher1539 Firdt movement has some weird rhythms but if he listened to himself it would probably get fixed

@@TheLifeisgood72no: this kind of rhythmic freedom was considered normal and desirable at the time, and can be heard in many other historic recordings. Robert Philip and others have written about this. Rhythms were not so much meant to be taken as literally notated, but were accentuated, reshaped etc for optimal expressive effect. This often sounds unusual to us today, because tastes changed over the course of the 20th in the direction of more literalistic interpretations. So what Scriabin is doing here is quite the lost art.

@@timothytikker3834 Even in his own day audience complained about his lack of rhythmic accuracy, and Scriabin himself did not consider himself an effective performer. The timing is off in many places in the first mvmt.

Different centuries, different styles of playing musical instruments. I once heard a ten-year-old girl, the granddaughter of a friend, play a small piece by Grieg, exquisitely. Possibly the odd wrong note, but only Beckmesser cares about those! Then she went through the music college system, and the next time I heard her she no longer played with the freedom that Grieg in particular allowed himself. His piano roll recording of Sommerfugl/Papillon/Schmetterling on Welte-Mignon darts impulsively about, no doubt just like the butterflies that he saw from his composing hut by the local fjord. Many modern pianists turn it into a nuts and bolts wing machine, and even the best (since the best will have taken the trouble to listen to Grieg) replace the impulsiveness with a tidier, scaled down version, full of perceived good taste and Steinway "D"s. About fifteen years ago I gave a small Pianola recital at a friend's house in north London. I included some Grieg, though I can't remember what it was. Afterwards an elderly lady found me, and told me that she was Norwegian, and that her grandfather had been a medical doctor in Bergen. She said that Grieg had died in her grandfather's arms. I took her hand in mine. These piano rolls are something like the lady's memory - the nearest we have to touching and thereby thanking the musicians of past centuries. Thank you for taking the trouble to comment.

You gotta remember the Piano Roll isn’t doing justice to Scriabin’s playing… there’s no balance, dynamics

​@@TheLifeisgood72 Piano rolls are very poorly understood nowadays, just as the attitudes of human society in the early twentieth century are difficult for all of us to comprehend. I've been involved with piano rolls for something over fifty years, and I still find myself coming across new details of how they were made, how they were perceived and so on. Many people nowadays don't even seek to understand them in any great detail, and it is a bitter pill to swallow, accepting that they will be dealt with in a less exact way, as modern society changes. It's the same with all aspects of human society, in that the further away we are from a historical period, the more that history becomes a fairy tale. Music rolls are portraits, not photographs, and furthermore they were not made with the intention of passing on musical performances to posterity. There may have been one or two pianists whose egos were flattered by the perception that they were recording for future generations, but the owners of the companies which developed these systems were in it for the money, make no mistake, and the market was aimed at those who were alive, not those who might be born in a hundred years' time. In the publicity of the time you find all sorts of lurid prose about the accuracy of the technology and the almost god-like attitude towards the pianists (and organists) involved, so if you are trying to understand the reality of those times, you cannot trust the advertisements. You also can't trust most of the books written about the subject, especially the modern ones, because there has been such a dearth of accurate information over many decades, and therefore those who write the modern books have very little on which to base their writings, especially because busy professors and musicians so often don't have the time to carry out original research. Arguably, the man who invented the Ampico reproducing piano, Charles Fuller Stoddard, was the greatest liar of the original period, or certainly the most successful, because he knew how to colour his accounts so that they seemed very believable. I have high-resolution scans of a "Salesmen's Manual" for the Ampico, in which staff are told how best to lie about the competitors' systems. But Hupfeld was not so different, and it glossed over the methods of recording by means of careful advertising. A good selection of the correspondence from the Hupfeld company to its recording artists has survived, thanks to the desire for preservation that the communist regime in East Germany upheld. It's very clear that in the early days (1905 to about 1910), Hupfeld had no method of recording dynamics, because they asked their pianists to send them letters detailing the dynamics that they wanted, after the recording sessions had taken place and the pianists had returned home. The replies have on the whole not survived, but how on earth is a written letter, of less than a hundred pages, likely to contain a detailed analysis of the individual keystrokes of a complete recording session? In any case, pianists of that time had no personal means of measuring the speed of their individual keystrokes - the whole ethos of the time was far less exact and much more emotional. The only dynamic recording patent taken out by Hupfeld dates from the early 1920s, and it consists of a method whereby a player-pianist's pedalling could be converted into levels of suction that could in turn be used to mark up a wavy dynamic line on a music roll. Two foot-pedals and an equaliser with a spring would result in a very wavy line indeed, as the illustrations on the patent pages testify, and any similar mechanism derived from the expression box of a reproducing piano would produce a similar result, whereas the printed lines on Hupfeld rolls are straight lines with corners, which would be impossible to create by anything other than an editor's decisions. There was a very similar patent awarded to the Wilcox and White Company in Meriden, Connecticut, for use with the Artrio-Angelus system, but that company failed and was bought out in the early 1920s, so in all probability Hupfeld reckoned it was safe to apply for European patents at that stage. The Aeolian Company, for its Duo-Art, originally wanted to use a similar system, and a photo from 1915 has survived at the Library of Congress of the main roll editor (W. Creary Woods) using a push-up Pianola secured to a second recording piano as Paderewski played in the foreground. There was a long drawn out litigation process between Aeolian and Wilcox & White, which Aeolian eventually lost, at which point Aeolian changed to the system of rotating dial knobs that appear in many photographs from both their New York and London studios. I do the best I can with these rolls. I don't do it to become famous, rich or loved, to be better than anyone else, or indeed to enhance my career, but I do it in order to share the music and musical styles that I love. In most cases you can find other KZfaq videos of the same rolls. I was lucky enough to have Simon Nicholls, Co-Chairman of the Scriabin Association, to guide me as I played them through, and in particular his wisdom over the thorny problem of Hupfeld roll speeds was invaluable. Hupfeld doesn't generally print exact roll speeds on its issued rolls, but instead it gives a speed range, between two numbers that are ten apart, and there has as yet been no definitive explanation of the paper speeds that these numbers represent. Simon and I decided that it was unlikely that Hupfeld would have used different roll speeds for rolls recorded in the same session, so we adopted a speed that we felt best matched all the rolls. The Poème, Op. 32, no. 1, is faster than the Welte-Mignon recording, and in the case of Welte there is generally not the same difficulty with overall roll speeds, though it is important to note that some longer Welte rolls run at 2.5 metres per minute, rather than 3 metres. But musicians play differently as the mood takes them, and the grouping of friends around Scriabin, as he recorded in Moscow, might have made him feel more intimate, in comparison to a less familiar recording studio in Leipzig, after having had to negotiate aggressively over recording fees. I note that Lifeisgood72 has used the Pierian CD track of that Poème on his channel, but has speeded it up by a little under 10% without altering the pitch, or has acquired it from someone else who has done so, and I'm curious to know what motivated that change. As I said, music rolls are portraits, and a portrait can sometimes create a better emotional atmosphere than a photograph, as you can see on page 21 of Pianola Journal no. 21, available free at www.pianola.org/journal/journal_vol21-22.cfm.

@@pianolainstitute What a great reply. A very interesting and enlightening response as a fellow piano roll enthusiast.

@@pianolainstituteThanks for the great reply. I think the 3rd and 4th movements are the perfect tempo, but the 1st and 2nd are a bit too fast. Maybe that’s why the other person said it sounds like an amateur plying. But the 4th movement is absolutely amazing, one of the best piano recordings on record.