Schumann Of Foreign Lands and Peoples

Hello Stig!

Thank you for your kind and most generous remarks on the Schumann and please know they are appreciated and highly valued. I love the Erard as you know and as you do, too.

I appreciate your taking time to visit my website and listening. I post recordings at my HearThis channel, too. Some recordings are the same but a few are different from those on the website. You might like Paderewski playing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10 on "our" Erard. The link is in my signature below or just click here:  https://hearthis.at/robertrivard/   and scroll down until you see it.

I've lost loved ones in recent years as well and agree with you that we must act as if today were our last day together. There's no way to get back time with them.

I hope you're doing well and enjoying your time at your keyboard.

Thank you again for everything!

Warmest regards,
Robert

Hello Amaryllis,

Sorry for the delay in my reply. I didn't know hearthis had a comment section for audio posts. I must have missed that but will look into it. Not sure I can take negative remarks at this point in my life. Let me give that some thought.

But thanks for asking!

My best,
Robert

Thank you Robert - so beautiful to hear! - love that sound and your musicianship.

The music, the cabin depicted in the video - the place to be. A real delight.

With best regards, I do hope you're enjoying more of the same tranquillity and grace as embodied by this lovely timeless piece.

Hello Qexl!

Sorry for the delay to respond to your very kind words. They're high praise indeed! So pleased you took time to listen and enjoyed it. The photo I found on pexels.com and liked the mood of it. It captured the music as I hear it.

Pleased to hear you like the sound of 1922 Erard (modified) as I keep tweaking it.

Hope you're doing well!

Take care,
Robert

Hi David,

It does seem like it's an obsession with the Erard, doesn't it. First, I love the sound and to my ears it sounds the most authentic of all the Pianoteq instruments. I don't care for the sound of huge, modern instruments whether real, sampled, or modeled. I have not been able to make them sound good on my system. When I first purchased Pianoteq in 2007 I did so just to have the 1922 Erard. So my love affair goes back a long way.

And there's just something special about the sound of the 1922 Erard, its variety of tone colours in all the registers, the power in the bass, its lyricism that soars in the upper register, it speaks to me. This will sound a bit odd (and I am odd, so that's okay) but there is somehow embedded in the computer coding a feeling of Love. I can't explain why I feel this Love when playing it. The other instruments don't have that same feeling for me and they are wonderful I must make sure to say.

I have kept tweaking until I found the sound I like best and I think I have finally done that. I've not made any changes for weeks now and will be using it for my next single to be recorded this week and released end of the month I hope.

Hope you're doing well!

Robert

Thanks, Robert.

I have enjoyed tinkering with the Erard and the Pleyel, especially when I was considering buying an old Pleyel (~1861, which I thankfully did not).  The Erard was always more powerful-sounding, but I forgot how good its bass really is until you just mentioned it, so I fired it up again.  I use to be a Steinway B fan for the longest time, but now the Petrof Mistral on my system sounds so incredibly close to a real piano - it's my current favorite, from bass on up (though I still love the sweet bell-like Steinway tones in the octave around C6).

I believe that each instrument and each preset must have different status amongst us because each sounds so much different with different sets of amplifiers and speakers, room set-ups, etc.