by David Rydh

A personal piano archive

Pieces, scores and recordings

I am an amateur pianist and occasionally play the cello. By profession, I am a professor of mathematics. This website brings together the music I play, pieces I am working on, links to scores, and a growing collection of recordings.

I primarily play for my own pleasure. Public performance has never been a central part of my musical life, and I rarely prepare pieces with a concert or recital in mind. The recordings on this site should be understood chiefly as part of my practice: a way of listening more critically, tracking my progress and giving greater focus to my playing. They are not intended as a collection of definitive performances, but as traces of an ongoing musical activity.

Grand piano with iPad score and page turner — Feurich grand piano, iPad score and page turner.

By composer

Explore the repertoire grouped by composer.

All pieces

Browse the complete list of pieces.

Recordings

Listen to recordings made as part of my practice.

How I play

My piano playing is centered on reading from the score. Rather than concentrating exclusively on a small number of pieces and memorizing them, I prefer to explore and maintain a broader repertoire. Although I have played regularly for most of my life, I have memorized almost nothing completely during the past twenty-five years.

The repertoire list reflects this way of playing. It includes pieces that I have studied seriously, pieces that I return to from time to time, and music that remains part of a larger personal library.

Annotated score on iPad — Most of my playing is from annotated digital scores.

The piano and my equipment

I play a Feurich 179 Dynamic II grand piano, which I tune myself using PianoMeter. Since 2020, I have played almost exclusively from an iPad rather than from printed scores. I mainly use Notability, which has superb annotation tools. I occasionally also use forScore, which is excellent for reading and performing from scores. The PageFlip Firefly completes the setup and works well with both Notability and forScore.

I usually play either from a score available at IMSLP, from my own scans of printed scores, or from new engravings I make with LilyPond. I make recordings with a Zoom H4 essential.

Inside of a grand piano with tuning equipment — Tuning setup inside the grand piano.

Musical interests

My repertoire is centered mainly on Romantic and Impressionist music, with Brahms, Chopin and Debussy among the composers I return to most often. As a listener, I particularly enjoy Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich and Stravinsky.