All, A belated thank you to everyone who responded to my question on what temperament to use for the Goldberg Variations. The variations were performed by two faculty members, two staff accompanists and a grad student using two harpsichords by two different makers. I would have preferred to have one harpsichord but it worked well enough with the two. One player was ready and waiting to start after the current player finished. They went straight through and most repeats were performed. It took some experimenting to find the sound they liked. While Lehman or the Handel temperaments sounded pretty good to me, they wanted a bit more "spice." Ed Foote's suggestion to have a look at rollingball.com was very helpful. Quick glances at the charts gave me an idea on how the temperament might sound. I wish I had more time to experiment with many more temperaments. I started out with Valotti/Young since it is nicely centered on G. I also tried Kirnberger and Werckmeister. All of these three worked well for the most part but there were certain passages in a number of the variations where things got too spicy. I tried a few others from rollingball.com but the results were similar. I was not getting anywhere with the temperaments so I decided to practice that old tradition of Tuner's Discretion. Since Valotti/Young is centered on G I tweaked a few of the accidentals thus slowing down some of the thirds. I put this tuning on the instruments for the dress rehearsal. They said this worked well. I was not at the dress so this modified temperament is what I used for the recital. What I heard in the recital is a bit different from the report I got after the dress rehearsal. I found the modified Valotti/Young a bit too spicy for my taste in certain passages. For the most part the faster variations sounded pretty good but there were times in most of the slow variations where it did not work for me. The one exception was the slow variation #25. It really worked on this piece. Quite surprising! Most likely I just stumbled on another named well tempered tuning when I modified Valotti/Young but I do not have a clue which it might be. So, prior to the recital I named it Don's Golden for the Goldbergs! After the recital - not so Golden. Anyway, there is always next year. They are talking about the Inventions for that recital. Thanks again, Don Donald McKechnie Piano Technician Ithaca College dmckech at ithaca.edu 607.274.3908 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091005/8f41174a/attachment.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC