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Once upon a time I compared a recording of Bernstein conducting and playing piano on Rhapsody in Blue to a recording of Andre Previn conducting and playing piano on the same piece. The Previn recording was in every respect better, but two things struck me in particular. At one point Bernstein's piano goes into swing eighths, on the ostensible ground that Gershwin is jazz. In fact, Gershwin's conception of jazz rhythm was much closer to ragtime, which Previn, an accomplished jazz pianist himself, knew very well. At another point the Bernstein recording has a glaring wrong note which Bernstein decided to leave, presumably because he thought punching-in over it would destroy the spontaneity or expressive continuity of the performance, which to my mind is greatly to over-prize it. McCoy Tyner plays a wrong note in his solo on the John Coltrane recording of "My Favorite Things", and it's left, as well it needs to be, but that's jazz--where spontaneity and expressive continuity are all.
Milan Kundera (author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being but trained as a composer and son of an internationally famous Czech pianist and musicologist) devotes a conspicuous section of his Testaments Betrayed to what he views, convincingly, as Bernstein's unforgivable distortion of The Rite of Spring.
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