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I find Salzedo’s transcriptions to generally make pieces more accessible. Clair de Lune, on the other hand, is an extremely hard piece to do well, in my experience. The great thing is that you have so much to look forward to, you can spend the rest of your life working on pieces by Debussy, which is wonderful. Do your fingertraining now, get them to work well, to be able to play different patterns.
Tell them to keep to basics, what they know, or will soon know, works. Four notes per hand maximum. Maximum interval between fingers, a fourth, sixth with thumb. No overlapping. Use scales, arpeggios, glissandi. Broken chord patterns: 1423, 1243, 4231, etc., but not 1324, preferably. Show them the range in which melody sounds well, the range for chords, and where they get muddy. Demonstrate harmonics and muffling. And avoid chromatic passages.
If they see it in Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and whoever else you think is safe, then it is okay to do it. Do not use Strauss, Wagner, Ravel, Bartok as examples. (Ravel has some very tricky and awkward passages.) They can consult the Berlioz-Strauss Orchestration text, and Gardner Read, but be wary of others. Unless you know of one that is quite accurate. I don’t know all of them, but don’t know any offhand that are completely trustworthy.
Yes, I found I was misled by a shady character who used to lurk in these forums as to the harp status in Greece.
Reverie is a piece that is rhythmically tricky, but otherwise quite straightforward, and very pleasurable. It is also very good for technical development. I think there are several available transcriptions.
I think Rampal and Laskine used the Reinecke. It was probably an Erato recording, which I got from Musical Heritage Society. But, I
I prefer the Chicago models to the 85 series. The 85s have always had a heavy quality to me that I don’t like as well.
A cassette recorder with a decent microphone would work just fine and would be the simplest to use, by far.
It was my impression that Salzedo came up with the substitution of aeolian fluxes for the fingered pattern, not to make it easier, per se, but to modernize it, in a sense. Stokowski liked to do this in many orchestral works, turning arpeggios into glissandos, considering that a preferable effect. While the glissandi may seen easier, if you try to replicate the phrasing of the fingered pattern, they are not so easy. If Renie played with glissandi, I am curious when she did that, perhaps Salzedo got the idea from her or the other way around.
The Boston Symphony Chamber Players recording, with Ann Hobson Pilot playing, she uses the glissandi. Salzedo has other edits that are very helpful in making the harp part speak clearly.Missing or misplaced clefs are among the most common errors, and certain publishers have certain errors more frequently than others. There are many clef problems in Ravel’s parts, as I recall.
