Most definitely, and he pioneered new conventions of technique in this respect, also with respect to notation - at least according to Czerny (though it's not out of the question that this might be Czerny's agenda as much as Beethoven's), when a series of notes have no slurs or phrasing marks, the default touch is legato, whereas in Haydn and Mozart scholars have pretty definitively concluded that the convention then would be non legato.


There's lots of stuff in three books in particular, Sandra Rosenbloom's Performance Practices in Classical Piano Music: Their Principles and Applications, William S. Newman's Beethoven on Beethoven: Playing His Piano Music His Way (awful title, but wonderful book), and George Barth's The Pianist as Orator, the latter looking in particular at the conflicting accounts of Beethoven's playing by Czerny and Schindler. I have all of these, and will try to dig some stuff out from them later.


Yes, indeed.


Deppe pioneered the 'free fall' technique (about which one can read quite a bit in the book by my own teacher, György Sándor, On Piano Playing: Motion, Sound and Expression, though Sándor doesn't specifically refer to Deppe. This technique is sometimes mistakenly taken to represent 'weight technique', when really it is 'gravity technique', quite a different thing. 'Weight technique' was pioneered in particular by Rudolf Breithaupt in his book Die Grundlage der natürliche Klaviertechnik (1905), and was influential on a number of pianists including Teresa Carreño and later Claudio Arrau.


Couldn't agree more, a far more economical approach than the 'thumb under' technique.


That occurs when pianists move the elbow without also moving the wrist, so they have to make vastly over-extravagant motions. A composite lateral motion of the wrist and elbow enables the hand to turn outwards in the manner you describe.


Often at a first lesson I ask a student where they think their finger muscles lead to. Some point at the knuckles, others at the wrist, few seem to know that they extend right along the forearm towards the elbow. A finger is an extension of its forearm muscle, and the position of the wrist, as affects whether such a muscle is bent or not (thus causing friction) significantly affects the freedom and flexibility of each finger. The fingers can never be separated entirely from the arm, whatever generations of coins on wrist, books under elbows, teachers will say.


I'd say that it's the sensitivity in the joints (those between the phalanxes of the fingers, the knuckle joints, the wrist, even the elbow joint) that counts in terms the way in which the pressure on the key at the moment of impact is affected.


Well, do bear in mind that Chopin's pedalling indications are very extravagant indeed (though the somewhat lesser sustaining power of the instruments he knew should be taken into account). As well as the common 'use the pedal most of the time, change with every harmony' approach that has been drilled into many students the world round, there were a wide range of different approaches to pedalling in the 19th century (and afterwards), some employing more pedal than is now common, some employing less.

Sure, but I've heard some suggest that while there isn't a single 'Russian school', one can reasonably identify a group of schools, particularly those influenced by the teachings of such prominent teachers as Blumenfeld, Neuhaus, Igumonov, and so on?

Some reasonably recent Russian pianists I suppose one might associate with what's seen in the West as a 'typical Russian school' might be Gavrilov, Berezovsky or Kissin, though I realise there are other players extremely different (for example Toradze, Batagov, Afanassiev or Tverskaya!).


Very much so. When composers notate those nowadays, however, the results differ from instrument to instrument.


Yes, he was born in Budapest in 1912, though moved to the US in the 1930s, where he remained for the rest of his life. Here is an obituary to which I contributed a section - http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article334785.ece


I studied with him in my early 20s, so as a mature pianist, but for some time before then I had known his book, which I think is the best of its type, and so was well familiar with his methods which I had adopted in many respects. He taught many things, we worked on a broad range of repertoire, some of his musical thinking I find nowadays a little narrow, very rooted in a particular late romantic/early modern attitude which is applied across the board without really taking much account of stylistic and idiomatic differences. Also he was resolutely unsympathetic both to post-1945 music and to historically-informed performance, both of which are two of my primary interests. But I learned a lot from him, and admire his playing greatly.

Basically he had no time for music which was not organised around tonal centres, which he was adamant Bartok was, in all of his pieces. Some tried to persuade him to play Ligeti, but he couldn't stand the music, so never did.