Piano roll recital presented by Peter Phillips at Steinway G
About
This unusual recital presents historic pianists from their piano rolls playing their works on a new Steinway Model B Spirio piano. The recital is being held at Steinway Galleries 45 Chandos Street , St Leonards, starting at 3:00 PM. All the pianists in this recital were Steinway artists in their day, such as Percy Grainger, Ignaz Paderewski and Arthur Rubinstein. Charles Steinway will also play one of his own compositions, from a piano roll he made in 1913. History coming alive, given that Steinway has had a long association with instruments that play music from piano rolls.The reproducing piano roll is the forerunner of today’s digital technology, in which all aspects of a pianist’s playing were in some way encoded on a roll of paper. Sales of these rolls and the instruments to play them began in 1905, and the success of this form of recording meant most of the famous pianists and many composers of the day recorded their art this way. Fast forward to the present day, and the original reproducing pianos of the early 20th century have been superseded by pianos that play from computer files, called MIDI files. It is therefore a logical step to convert the reproducing piano roll recordings to MIDI files so they can be heard on modern instruments.
Peter Phillips began work on this type of conversion in 1979, and over the last 45 years has acquired a large library of piano roll recordings that can be played on a modern player piano, such as Yamaha’s Disklavier or the Steinway Spirio. Peter’s work in this field led him to undertake a PhD at Sydney University, supervised by Professor Neal Peres Da Costa. He graduated in 2017, and has since given presentations and lectures in many parts of the world, including Stanford, Cornell, Bern, Sydney and Leipzig universities. His recital in October will include a mix of well-known and unfamiliar works, played by renowned pianists of the day. The recital is being held at the home of Peter’s mentor and long-time friend Denis Condon. Denis left a legacy of over 6000 reproducing piano rolls, now owned by Stanford University and which Peter digitised before they left Sydney.
Date
Saturday 16 May 2026 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (UTC+10)Location
Steinway Galleries
45 Chandos Street, St Leonards NSW 2065
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Piano roll recital presented by Peter Phillips at Steinway G
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