Melvyn Tan plays the same Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 23 discussed here on the fortepiano with, I believe, non-equal temperament tuning, too. This is quite amazing, with its clarity and register color contrast that can only be approached with deliberate care in that video by Barenboim. This recording actually makes the second movement make sense finally.
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Didn’t know what the big deal was so I took a listen to this “Air and Simple Gifts” piece. So not only was it performed to recording, the piece itself is a cheap knockoff, quoting almost verbatim Copland’s use of a pre-existing shaker melody (“Simple Gifts”) down to instrumentation, plus some other less than appealing thematic fluff and unoriginal variations thereof.

Yo-Yo Ma told NPR’s All Things Considered that the piano keys had been decoupled from the hammers, and the bows of the stringed instruments had been soaped to silence them.

So much trouble for a … meh … piece. I’m disappointed. This isn’t even as good as the 40′s movie music “At Last” performed at the Ball in the ‘Hood.

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