Paderewski Festival Raleigh

Only a few days to go before our announcement of our four pianists for the 13th Annual Paderewski Piano Festival of Raleigh!
Meanwhile, I've picked up five programs for the Boston Symphony. Three of them feature Paderewski playing concerti; the other two feature Josef Hofmann. They came as a package, and Josef Hofmann was a marvelous pianist, of many talents.
We'll put them up one at a time; they're 52 pages long -- a true booklet -- with a cover. This tour was unusual; Paderewski played Weber pianos -- rather then Steinways. It was the only tour of that type. The piano at the hotel in Paso Robles is a Weber, an oddity. It was the subject of a contretemps in Warsaw in 2016 when a member of the Vancouver group charged that it had been spirited away in some fashion from the Consulate General there.

Just in today, by mail. Another Paderewski concert program, this time on March 14, 1932, in Madison, Wisconsin. This one was well under $70, so I got to it first.
It's not a remarkable program, no great association with personages or events. It was of interest to me, in part, because my mother's next younger sister was a journalism graduate student at the University of Wisconsin that year (1931-1932). She had placed first in her class at Woman's College in Greensboro (now UNCG) and won the Weil Fellowship -- to take anywhere. She later worked for the Madison newspaper, lived 15 years in Hong Kong, and finished out her classic journalist's life with the Clearwater Sun, in Florida. My favorite aunt: 85 pounds of hard-bitten ci******es, liquor, and speech. Outlived all her physicians to die at 96.
I'll bet she was there -- to hear Paderewski.

Datelined yesterday, Richard Morrison -- "Chief Culture Writer" for The London Times -- published a list of ten GOATs of the piano.
The occasion is the 125th anniversary of Wigmore Hall. He, or whoever, had a number of present leading pianists compile lists and then combined the results through some semi-occult process.

We were disappointed to find no rank for Paderewski. So be it. Subjective in the extreme.
Here is their list:

10. Vladimir Sofronitsky
9. Artur Schnabel
8. Martha Argerich
7. Alfred Cortot
6. Artur Rubinstein
5. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
4. Radu Lupu
3. Vladimir Horowitz
2. Sviatoslav Richter
1. Sergei Rachmaninov

The celebration of Wigmore Hall begins on May 25 and runs for two weeks. The ranking panel seems to include -- by and large -- a good many of those performing then.

As of 4:30 this afternoon, my posting with the three posters was approaching 1000 views (971, to be exact).
I don't know how this wonderful phenomenon came about. The previous high was over 400; normal runs for my posts are in the range of 50-100.
So, I sat down to see what I could put up to capitalize on this unexpected development. Maybe those 1000 will look again.
Here are two Paderewski programs I didn't win on eBay. Oddly enough, neither is listed in Perkowska's great work listing hundreds of programs played by Paderewski. It seems that quite a number of programs did not make into the ken of posterity. I have half a dozen myself.
These two programs got away because the prices being asked now have gone well above the $10 or so of 20 years ago. I won't bid over $70 unless it's a really pivotal program--like the Herbert Hoover program of 1896. These two programs went for over $70. The first program below was played in Havana, February 17, 1926; Perkowska lists two programs played there/then, bracketing the date of this program. Sometimes programs could vary by a day or two--as in Raleigh in 1939, vicissitudes of travel--but this one listed a different venue. The performance was probably added by some musical entrepreneur/impresario.
The second program was played in Albany, NY, on March 18, 1892. First tour of the US, true -- but Perkowska lists at least 58 concerts on that tour before that date. Run of the mill; he was ruthlessly driven by tour managers to play.