Video: Schumann/Liszt--Widmung (Dedication)

Here is the second video from my first session at the new house. It's Franz Liszt's solo piano arrangement of Robert Schumann's Widmung (Dedication), which was originally written for piano and voice. I think it's pretty safe to say that this is the most beautiful piece of music ever. I'd been putting off recording this one for fear of not doing it justice. But at some point you just have to hold your nose, pull the trigger and jump. (?).

A couple of technical comments... these two videos (Widmung and Alt Wien) are the first I've filmed with two cameras simultaneously. I bought Johanne a new camera for Christmas (a Panasonic Lumix FZ150). It does HD video too, so I nabbed it for a morning to do these two pieces. It makes the post-editing go a lot faster to have two angles to choose from for any given take. The problem is that even though both cameras were shooting full 1080p video, the quality of the Panasonic's video is much better than my Canon. The shots from the treble are all Panasonic, the shots from the bass are the Canon. The Panasonic shots are much crisper, and there's very little digital noise. The Canon shots are a little blurry by comparison and you can see plenty of digital noise in the near outer casing and inner (wooden) rim of the piano.

For the audio, I decided to close-mic the piano a little more than I did in Austin. There's more house noise and street noise here, and putting the microphones closer helps get cleaner sound. But it also means there's less of the desirable kind of room noise (natural reverberation). So there's a little more work to do in the audio mixing/mastering to get a sound that fits naturally with what you're seeing in the video. I could probably have added even more recreated room sound, but it's at the expense of clarity.

Anyway, here's the video. I hope you enjoy it!