I have heard that Paderewski wrote to the piano-roll company for which he recorded listing the passages he wanted re-adjusted because he hadn't played them cleanly.
One begins to wonder if performances that are made up of bits and pieces of takes and re-takes cobbled together by sound engineers are, in a way, a form of deceit. There's a story (I can't vouch for it) that, listening to the final results of recordings of the Chopin concertos which had been put together after numerous attempts to get passages right, the pianist said to the conductor Artur Rodzinski "Doesn't it sound wonderful?" to which Rodzinski replied, "Yes, don't you wish you could play like that?"
I can vouch for the fact that one of my piano teachers , who broadcast frequently for the BBC, was moaning that Bela Siki had been given the chance to record a performance of "La Campanella" for a foreign radio station which was made up of many "takes" whereas the BBC expected performances to be done in one take.
It's known that there are performers who dislike the practice of stitching together performances out of numerous takes and will only agree to recording large portions of the music at a time. But this is getting away from the original purpose of the thread.
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