Two different versions of Clair de Lune

[ShiroKuro]

I'm pretty sure I already posted this video of Victor Borge playing Clair de Lune, but in the thread about using AI to detect AI, the topic of music and digital pianos came up...

So listen to these two different versions of Clair de Lune. The first by Victor Borge

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1595935812544429

The second by Rousseau, the YouTube pianist (who actually started the trend of this kind of video)

Link to video

The Rousseau version is so clean... It's nice enough (and I certainly couldn't play it this well!) and actually I think this recording and this video would be an excellent learning tool (which I will probably make use of when I start working on this piece).

But it also strikes me as very sterile. It's too precise, too clean, too sterile. And I don't really care if I ever listen to it again.

Victor Borge's Clair de Lune, on the other hand, I am obsessed with. I can't listen to it enough.

[Bernard]

I probably don't need to say that I don't like Rousseau's version. It's disjointed and played like a pop song.

[ShiroKuro]

@Bernard said:

played like a pop song

Oooh, that's interesting! Maybe that's part of why it falls flat for me... I wouldn't have thought to describe it that way, but once you said it, it rings true.

There's nothing wrong with pop music, to be sure (and there's a lot of pop music that I like). But Debussy is not pop music, so that approach doesn't work here. IMO.

I have actually always thought that I Giorni, by the post-classical pianist Ludovico Einaudi, has very strong "pop music sensibilities" ... so to play this piece like a pop song would be fine. IMO of course.

back to Clair de Lune... Listening to it, I also wondered if Borge's style of playing is not currently "in vogue" in the classical piano world, but I don't know because I don't really know what's "in vogue" (like, I don't know, how would Lang Lang or Yuja Wang play CdL?)

[AndyD]

I don't like CdeL usually, but Børge was a child prodigy, and there's eighty years of musicianship being expressed on a rather nice Bosendorfer.
Almost in tears watching the old man show how it ought to be played. I am going to have to learn it.