Monday, January 2, 2012

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!


11 comments:

  1. Lovely! My favorite of all the pieces you play. It sounds wonderful.

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  2. Great, Kenneth. I noted that the "treble" camera, at one point, started in close and slowly withdrew to a wider angle. Nice touch! I did not notice the colour variance between right and left and I did watch for it the second time around. In any case it is not the least distracting if it is there. As your mother says, this is really a wonderful piece played beautifully.

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  3. I used the unzoom trick at the beginning of Maiden, too. I did color-matching of the two cameras during editing to get them as similar as possible (something I've been doing even with one camera, as the light and color from different angles can be jarringly different).

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  4. Hi Kenneth, I'm a friend of your father. I truly enjoy your wonderful music and admire your talent.
    Roly Breton

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  5. Wow. What an incredible piece. I still have my sentimental favorite though. :)

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  6. Hey Roly. Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you're enjoying the recordings.

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  7. @Marla: Man, I haven't played the Debussy in an age. (According to my logs, I didn't even play it once in 2011). Maybe I'll dust it off today.

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  8. What a marvelous YouTube/web/blog, etc.

    I stumbled across Alicia de Larrocha - Danza de la Pastora, and then found your YT video, read much of your experiences, delighted to backtrack through your CV and dissertation.

    I'm a retired IBM Systems Engineer and dabble around as writer/photographer/filmmaker and late entry piano student (third lesson today, Alfred's Adult Piano Jingle Bells #17 level).

    What an inspiration!

    In a race against time, though, as age & arthritis compete to limit the years of learning I look forward to.

    Life is good - fuzzydogvideo.com

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  9. This is absolutely beautiful. Thanks for sharing!!

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  10. Fantastic video, I really love it. Thanks for sharing!

    Art Information

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  11. I had to watch this one, as I "sang" Widmung in college. Much nicer to watch and listen. Great job on playing, and videoing. Hi to Johanna

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