Saturday 13th October, from 09:15 to 11:00

Katie Hafner, will present her book:

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS
Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano

A book about three characters: Glenn Gould, a piano and a piano technician/tuner: Verne Edquist.

Katie will offer us an insight on the long path she had to follow to be able to offer us the joy of reading this entertaining, educational and enlightening book on Glenn Gould, pianos, music and music making and … the writing of a book, in general.

Katie’s presentation will take place on Saturday 13th October, from 9:15 to 11:00am, at the Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall. We will count with the presence and participation of Verne Edquist during this presentation.

Two events presented for the first time
not only in Hong Kong but in the whole of Asia…

Imagine sitting in a room and hearing great musicians such as Glenn Gould, Sergei Rachmaninoff and George Gershwin play for you in person. You can witness this dream on Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th October, realized by software from Zenph Sound Innovations. Based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Zenph’s focus was deeply understanding – and precisely recreating – how musicians perform. Piano music performed by Glenn Gould (on Saturday 13th Oct.), Rachmaninoff, Albeniz, Granados, Gershwin, and Ruth Slenczynska (on Sunday 14th Oct.) will be presented by Zenph’s founder, Dr. John Q. Walker.

Very briefly, this is how Dr. John Q. Walker explained to us what we are going to witness in the course of these two unique presentations:

Zenph’s process started with artists’ original audio recordings – for Rachmaninoff, it was 78 rpm records, for Albeniz, it was wax cylinders – and determined how each note and pedal were played. For a note, this includes the microsecond it was struck, the force and the touch, how long it was held, how it was released, where the pedals were, and so on. This information is saved as computer data; if you think of it as a giant spreadsheet, there’s one row in the spreadsheet for each note or pedal movement.

The data, known as a re-performance^®, is played by this rare high-resolution Yamaha Disklavier PRO concert grand, secured by the festival from the factory in Japan. These re-performance files offer unique insight into how pianists as diverse as Glenn Gould and Art Tatum actually played. Zenph work is featured by Sony Masterworks in their acclaimed albums: Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations from 1955, Art Tatum: Piano Starts Here, Rachmaninoff plays Rachmaninoff, Oscar Peterson: Unmistakable, and Joshua Bell, At Home with Friends. In addition, rare Zenph material, never recorded, can be heard for the first time. Learn more at www.Zenph.com.

Ruth Slenczynska, one of the world’s renowned Chopin artists, is Rachmaninoff’s only living student – and a teacher of Dr. Walker. She’ll be heard in private performances recorded by Dr. Walker.

Plan to attend these special events, the only ones of its kind ever in Asia. They will be taking place as follows:

	Sunday 14th October, from 10:00am to 15:00 (with a one hour break between 12:00 and 13:00) **** RE-PERFORMANCE - EVENT TWO **** A presentation of Rachmaninoff, Albeniz, Granados, Gershwin and Slenczynska playing their own and other compositions on an actual piano - not recordings - through the technological miracle of performing pianos.

Thanks to the collaboration of Yamaha Corporation Japan who will make it possible for us to have the use of a YAMAHA PIANO (DISKLAVIER PRO) which, as we mentioned above, will be flown specially from Japan for these unique events, John Q. Walker, an engineer closely associated with the development of the “re-performance” technology, will be presenting this revolutionary technology which is a fundamentally new method of encoding music as performance data rather than audio recording.
We will be presenting this very special event on Sunday 14th October between 10:00am and 3:00pm, with a one hour break between 12:00 and 1:00pm.