This is the second in a series of attempts to do some piano recordings, a project which started out of a desire to conquer stagefright on the rare occasions that I perform in public. Increasingly I have been investigating the process in more depth, making use of Cubase and various recording techniques. The result of these investigations is this recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in D Major, which I performed at a recital in June. This represents probably the best recording I can achieve given my upright piano and limited knowledge of recording techniques. The audio player requires Silverlight, I have also provided a link to an mp3 file.

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Silverlight 3.0 moved its featureset closer to that of WPF by adding support for merged Resource Dictionaries and Style Inheritance. Without these features, developing custom templates and styles for Silverlight controls can become a bit of a copy-and-paste nightmare. Since I have used the implicit theming feature built into the Silverlight Toolkit to make my Silverlight controls fit into the overall look and feel of this site, I was hoping that these features would enable me to refactor my themes developed for Silverlight 2.0 to be a bit less unwieldy.

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Prelude in C♯ Minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

In December I had my first piano recital in nearly two years, and so I started to look into various methods that performers use to conquer performance anxiety, something which causes me a lot of grief. Lately I’ve been hanging around with a number of friends involved in Cambridge’s thriving local music scene, and so not willing to go the beta blockers route I started thinking about doing some recordings. This way not only do I get to hear what the audience hears but it also reproduces some of the pressure that comes with performing for an audience. The audiofile above is my first effort, a recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C♯ Minor.

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