There are 5 months gone since my last text, 5 very busy months, recording 5 Poèmes and one short piece by Ysaÿe.
Because the last editing work I had done was a calm and relatively easy slow piece, I did start with that.
Unfortunately, I don’t have my wonderful studio for recordings since years, so I had to find the way to get a reasonable sound and acoustics. Fortunately, our new house in Germany is in a very calm neighbourhood on a dead end road, especially quiet at weekends in wintertime, so I tried actually already last year to record there simply in the living room. (my transcription of the Chopin Fantaisie Impromptu)
It’s far from perfect but at least it doesn’t have very bad acoustics, being quite high and reasonable sized.
I did set up my Schoeps and B&Q mics and turned on my ancient ProTools 6.4 session.
After recording end editing all, I started to make a (pianists stop reading here) piano accompaniment.
Already this old version of PT has the possibility of using quite advence midi, so I took the Steinway D von Garritan library and using the midi output of Finale I did import all the midi files into the PT sessions.
I must say, I thought it would be a quite simple process… however, it was a long work until having a reasonable result, especially for the piano solo parts.
I thought, maybe it will be easier by the time but actually the last Poème Chant d’Hiver took me ages until it was sounding real.
I know, this solution wasn’t the best but hey, better than nothing. In the meantime my pianist partner in Vienna did cut her workload, and we will be able to come together and making “real” recordings also soon. A Japan tour is planned again, so we can perform these great music there also.
I made all these recordings available free in my YouTube channel iStrings4 and of course the sheet music is available right here at istrings.eu
I still hope that the music of Ysaÿe will be discovered by many violinists soon!