
As you will see from the description attached to each of the twelve videos, these music rolls were originally recorded by Scriabin on 27 January, 1908, at the studios of the Ludwig Hupfeld Company in Leipzig. They were initially published in the Company's 73-note series, some time before 1912, and later transferred to the 88-note system no later than 1920. The rolls used for these recordings were given to William Candy in the 1920s, who worked as a demonstrator for Blüthners in London, which was Hupfeld's agency at the time. In the late 1970s Bill gave me his entire collection of about 1,000 rolls, and they formed the basis of what has become the Pianola Institute's collection. All Scriabin's Hupfeld rolls were amongst them, with the exception of just one, the Feuillet d'Album which comes second in this playlist. The interesting story about that particular roll is described in the notes attached to that video, so we shall whet your appetite by not describing it here. Like most rolls of Hupfeld's that have survived, these contain the notes and their duration, a representation of the sustaining pedalling that can on occasions be rather rough, and a printed line indicating the general crescendos and diminuendos. These things need to be interpreted sympathetically, or you end up with mechanical-sounding performances. Recorded piano rolls are portraits and not photographs, but quite often a portrait can be more faithful to a pianist's emotions than a photograph, as can be seen in Alfred Grünfeld's comparative represemtations on page 24 of Pianola Journal 14 (2001), which is available for free download on the Journal pages of our website, at http://www.pianola.org. Rex Lawson