Really good documentary on him.

He has incredible talents, but his playing leaves me pretty cold. It's a bit of a trap when watching these savant guys perform to be like "sure they can hit the right notes, but what about emotion?" and really I'd want to listen to him vs other pianists blind to make sure I don't just have preconceptions. But I listened to him play and improvise a couple of pieces I know well (the Star Wars main theme and Stevie Wonder's Superstition) and while his improvisations made musical sense, they didn't really make sense in terms of the feeling of the piece, or any kind of subversion of it, or anything. They were just added stuff.

The documentary I just linked addresses that. He is asked to play a piece then make it reflect a different emotion.

While we're on music, have you guys seen the Major Scaled major-key reworkings of songs that were originally in minor key? They were the first ones to come out, I think a bunch of other people have done similar things since.

Some people actually like this:



I think it sounds horrible. What is not in dispute is that this:



sounds like you're living inside a particularly disturbing David Lynch movie.

Yeah, and he failed it pretty hard. He was able to do the most basic possible things (like change to a minor key for sad, even I know that one) and then struck out completely on angry. The woman who played violin directly after had vastly better interpretations of the three emotions.

I'm not trying to be a party pooper here - he's an amazing player. It shows the importance of x-factor in art though imo.

Yeah I agree with what you are saying just pointing out that the documentary brings it up as well. Whole thing is fascinating but I found that to be one of the more interesting parts.

Google is trolling me btw.



Um, no.

I get what you are saying about emotion but considering DP's life condition, hard to blame him for that.

But technically, how does he compare to basically every piano player you've seen/heard? I'm asking because I don't know much about piano, only that DP seems to do **** that no one else could (is my guess).

His ability to reproduce pieces after hearing them once and to copy 10-note chords by ear is completely unparalleled. I'm not qualified to judge his technical playing ability but it doesn't seem obviously better than other top pianists. The stuff he does replaying pieces in different styles and so on is commonplace. The reason a big deal is made out of it with him is that most savants can't do stuff like that.

Here's the first 13:30 of that 4 hour piano piece:



I made it through two minutes

i bet that sorabji guy is fun at parties

I can't even be bothered to click the link.

I agree with Chris. Although DP has an incredible talent to play pieces after hearing them only once, that doesn't necessarily translate to the ability to understand the meaning behind musical pieces and how to convey the implicit emotion in it.

I'd much rather listen to Rubinstein, Horowitz or Brendel.

A few:

Valentina Lisitsa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Lisitsa

She's interesting because she is self-promoted in the classical piano world, making her fame by posting videos on YouTube since 2007.

Lisitsa posted her first YouTube video in 2007, gaining even more online attention after uploading her own set of Chopin etudes online for free (in response to an illegal upload of the same set beforehand). Her set of Chopin etudes reached the number one slot on Amazon's classical video recordings, and became the most-viewed online set of Chopin etudes on YouTube.

Yeah, she can play Chopin, but her renditions of Rachmaninoff, and the fact that she plays Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata mv.3 and Hammerklavier shows her incredible ability to handle extremely difficult pieces with charm.

Definitely look her up. Massive fan.

Francesco Libetta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Libetta

The only pianist to play all of Godowski's Chopin studies live, from memory. 'nuff said.

Pretty much everything in this link is extraordinarily difficult to play (and almost never played live), so you can figure each composer is technically more talented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQfolBNJexw

Marc-André Hamelin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc-Andr%C3%A9_Hamelin

Pretty much dedicates his life to conquering the hardest pieces you can imagine. Highly prolific and did record the Godowsky Left-handed studies. Technically better than the above two, possibly, but probably not as good. He is one of the few that will play Czerny, which is some interesting stuff.

Sergei Rachmaninoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Rachmaninoff

Of course, people try to attain the level of his play, and many pianists straight up fear playing his work.

Rachmaninoff playing his own stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...s+rachmaninoff

Sergei Prokofiev: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Prokofiev

He's my single favorite pianist to listen to. It is interesting because, in untalented hands, his music sounds like child's scribbling and toy work, but in good hands, just amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgnE25-kvyk

Goes without saying the Martha Argerich is an amazing pianist as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Argerich

I only linked to wikipedia for your interest, not to actually search for and listen to, hahaha.

Perhaps the best spy ever: Richard Sorge. He provided intelligence that quite literally turned the course of the Second World War. And he did it more than once. Stalin ignored his intel the first time, to Stalin's great woe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge

It must have been a bitter pill for him to finally realize his Soviet masters abandoned him because of the political embarrassment Stalin risked by it becoming public that he ignored Sorge's critically important intelligence. Not to mention being tortured and finally killed, of course.

Of course.

Pretty reasonable that he woulda been a bit bummed out about that tho.

As I think about it, I guess there isn't much difference between a) being tortured and killed and b) being betrayed and tortured and killed. Still, the betrayal part of it has got to sting.

I suppose it shouldn't be news to anyone that Josef Stalin couldn't be trusted.

Well he was apparently named a hero 20 years later so there's that.

The cynic in me says that was as much a political swipe at Stalin as anything else.

Not really. People love to believe that 'one man can save the world' in a James Bond-y way, but it isn't so. The defence of Moscow depended on other factors, mainly the raising of new reserves, and in any case Moscow was not a top German priority.

The German official historians, in Germany and the Second World War Vol. VI, attribute the German failure on the Eastern Front to a much larger cause: the RAF. The Soviets had to fight on only one front, the Germans on two, and by 1943 the Germans were forced to devote more manpower, weaponry and materiel to the fight against RAF Bomber Command than to the whole war on the Eastern Front. They gave up a fight they could and should have won, against the chaotic Red Army, for a fight they could never win -- because the defeat of the night bomber was technically beyond their means.

Not a notion entirely unfamiliar to Americans, at least in popular culture.

'As always, should you or any of your I.M. Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.'

You're probably right, although it's pretty interesting that Sorge told Stalin about Barbarossa (and was ignored) and then told him the circumstances in which Japan would enter the war -- both about as valuable as intel can be, even if I likely exaggerated the impact.

This sort of causation is hard to figure out. It's clear that the Russians came fairly close to losing Moscow, and also that the Russians moved 18 divisions, 1500 tanks, and 1500 or so from Siberia back to Moscow in the fall of 1941 -- but you're right that it's totally speculative to conclude that the Germans would have taken Moscow had the Russians not done so. Moscow was of course as much of a political as a military objective, but it's at least interesting to think about the possiblity of a Russian armistice with the Nazis if Moscow had fallen.

I guess the best example of a single piece of intel changing the course of the war was Midway, in which one intel officer pitched to Nimitz that the Midway garrison transmit an in-the-clear message about water desalinization problems. The Japanese repeated it in code that USA #1 had broken, which confirmed that the Japanese were going to attack Midway, and with what, when and from where. That resulted in the sinking of four carriers, a stack of planes, and most importantly, many trained pilots. That took the initiative away from the Japanese Navy in the Pacific. I don't know that it shortened the war any, just because the Pacific front ended when USA #1 dropped two atomic bombs, but Midway was a decisive victory that really did depend on intelligence and the analysis of one or two men.

Bumping this one only because it's so awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabern...airplane_crash

"On August 10, 1984, a Cessna L-19 Bird Dog (registration number N4584A), piloted by James Jeb Caddell, 38, crashed in a forest near Tabernash. The aircraft was en route from Granby, Colorado to Jeffco, Colorado. The wreck was found by a pair of backpackers three years later on August 23, 1987. A 6½ minute video shot from a VHS camcorder mounted on the instrument panel was found at the site. The heavily damaged tape, some of it hanging from tree branches, was recovered and repaired by Colorado deputy sheriff Dale Wood."


Here's the vid, it's very eerie: