Ghost concert to revive music of the past

0 Comments | AFP, April, 2005

PARIS (AFP) — Music lovers in North Carolina are due for a strange treat next month.

They will hear two piano virtuosi in concert... but both musicians are long dead.

The music will be played on a grand piano that has been specially programmed to give a note-perfect, live rendition of ancient recordings made by Alfred Cortot in 1928 and Glenn Gould in 1962.

"The piano will replicate every note struck, down to the velocity of the hammer and position of the key when it was played," the British weekly magazine New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.

The key to the phantom concert lies in the transcription of the scratchy recordings into a high-resolution version of MIDI, the standard format for encoding music for computers.

The usual...