Opera News Cover Feature

“Although this is my second CD of nocturnes, it’s my fourth CD of a Chopin project that I’ve been working on toward the centennial in 2010,” said pianist and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music faculty member Edward Auer.

As Auer explains the path to the final polishing of this CD was anything but easy. “There are people who’ll tell you that it must be great to be able to record, but frankly I prefer to play a concert. It begins at eight and by about ten-fifteen, it’s over. You may even have bombed,” he said with a laugh, “but it’s over.”

“With recording, it’s a very difficult and long drawn out process.  You work and work to come up with something that is as good as you can produce at this time, something that you can feel comfortable with. For this CD my wife Junghwa Moon who’s also a concert pianist was the producer. I think that the two of us almost said together that the scherzo weren’t quite good enough. So it was back to recording them again.

“In the past, I’ve actually had someone else listen to and select the final takes, but this time I did it my  self. That put an additional piece of pretty intense work into the process, but I’m actually glad that I did do it myself. There definitely was some drudgery, but there also was some learning during it and the final product did benefit from it.”