Leo Ornstein Schumann Symphonic Etudes partial

Sometime, probably in the late 1950s, I managed to capture (surreptitiously) some snatches of my father’s informal playing on a battered old piano that couldn’t come close to doing justice to it. It had been some years since he had stopped practicing and he had lost much of his technical skill, so he made a number of bloopers. Finally, I was using an ancient early home recording machine, so the sound quality is terrible.He would be furious if he knew that I was making these available for others to hear. He was a perfectionist: the only recording of his playing that he felt good about was that of the Chopin Fantasy impromptu • Leo Ornstein plays the... . Despite the obvious problems, these recordings are of interest in that they reveal a style of piano playing that existed in an earlier epoch when much freer interpretations make today’s playing style feel constrained, almost straight-jacketed. For those interested in interpretation - expression, phrasing, tempo, etc. - they offer a glimpse into a bygone era of piano playing.