Authentic Sound Podcast

When was the last time Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony knocked on your door? 00:23:11 — I. Allegro con brio01:11:48 — II. Andante con moto01:41:16 — III. Scherzo. Allegro01:58:39 — IV. Allegro Everyone knows those four notes. They may be the most famous opening in all of music. But familiarity can also become a problem: once a piece has become an icon, we often stop truly listening. In this episode, Wi...

First things first! Check out our new Kickstarter campaign (Carl Czerny School of Velocity here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/authenticsound/czernys-school-of-velocity-as-youve-never-heard-before) In this episode, we return to The Etude , the late nineteenth-century American music magazine, and look more closely at its remarkable discussions of the metronome. At first sight, the questions...

30% off of Chopin’s Piano works vol.1 - you’ll get the code at the end of the podcast! https://www.authenticsound.org/chopin-pianoworks-vol1 Did Franz Liszt really preserve Chopin’s musical tradition, or did that tradition already begin to shift within a single generation? In this episode of the Authentic Sound Podcast, we take a close look at Arthur Friedheim’s 1916 edition of Chopin’s Études. Fr...

In this episode of our Beethoven Listening Guide , we turn to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, a work that is too often treated as a lighter step back after the Eroica . We argue the opposite. The Fourth is one of Beethoven’s most original symphonies: a work of astonishing contrasts, a mysterious introduction that seems to suspend tonality itself, a first movement full of joy and tension, an Adagio of...

In this episode of the Authentic Sound Podcast, Wim Winters and Stefan Pospiech dive into one of the most unsettling questions surrounding Whole Beat Metronome Practice: if Whole Beat was once normal, why do late 19th-century musicians already seem confused by metronome marks? Using remarkable excerpts from The Etude magazine, they explore how pianists and teachers struggled with Czerny’s Op. 299,...

00:05 Introduction22:13 I. Allegro con brio1:01:06 II. Marcia funebre. Adagio assai1:41:55 III. Scherzo. Allegro vivace – Trio1:42:59 IV. Finale. Allegro molto In this fourth episode of our Beethoven Listening Guide , Alberto Sanna and I turn to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, a work that feels less like the next step after the Second than like the opening of an entirely new world. We discuss why this...

In this third and final episode of our Carl Czerny trilogy, we return to Op. 299, the School of Velocity , and listen to selections from the final ten etudes, comparing my upcoming recording with modern performances by Vivian Harvey Slater and Leslie Howard. But this episode goes beyond finger technique. We look at Czerny’s strange historical position: Beethoven’s student, Liszt’s teacher, a hugel...

Navigate through this episodes with these time codes: 00:06 Introduction14:13 I. Adagio molto – Allegro con brio1:11:02 II. Larghetto1:33:55 III. Scherzo. Allegro – Trio1:41:45 IV. Allegro molto In this third episode of our Beethoven Listening Guide , Alberto Sanna and I turn to Beethoven’s Second Symphony, a work that is often treated as a lighter companion to the First, yet proves on closer list...

In this episode of the Authentic Sound Podcast , Wim and Stefan take up one of the most revealing cases in the metronome debate: Max Reger and Karl Straube. Drawing on Marcel Punt’s study The Straube Code , they examine parallel editions of Reger’s organ works and ask how two radically different metronome notations could coexist, with Straube’s version explicitly approved by the composer. The disc...

In this second episode of our Beethoven Listening Guide , Alberto Sanna and I turn to Beethoven’s First Symphony. What may seem at first like a relatively classical work already reveals Beethoven’s unmistakable hand: the breaking of expectation, the control of tension, the use of silence, the power of rhythmic stability, and the constant play between humour, grandeur, and surprise. As in the rest...

In the second episode of our three-part series on Carl Czerny’s Op. 299, we move into etudes 21 to 30, where the School of Velocity becomes far more than a technical drill book. These pieces reveal drama, cantabile writing, repeated-note challenges, and a level of pianistic difficulty that raises serious questions about how Czerny’s metronome marks should be understood. Together, we compare Wim Wi...

In this opening episode of our new eleven-part Beethoven series, Alberto Sanna and I lay the foundation for the journey ahead. We discuss how this project began, why Czerny’s four-hand transcriptions of the symphonies are so extraordinary, and what we discovered while recording them on fortepiano. This is not just an introduction to the series. It is also an introduction to a way of listening. We...

In this episode, we revisit one of the most revealing texts in nineteenth-century music history: Gottfried Wilhelm Fink’s 1839 article on Mozart performance. Fink does not complain about minor nuances. He describes contemporary Mozart performances as wildly distorted, rushed, and destructive to the music itself. To show how far performance practice had drifted, he turned to Tomášek and had Don Gio...

For this episode, we recorded an extended interview in our own studio with Werner Trio , one of the best-known voices of classical music radio in Flanders. The conversation marks the release of our recording of Beethoven’s complete symphonies performed according to Whole Beat metronome practice , and explores the ideas behind this controversial approach to Beethoven’s tempo indications. Together w...

In this episode, we take a close look at Mozart’s early Piano Sonata in C major and ask a deceptively simple question: what happens when tempo is wrong? Using performances by Ronald Brautigam and Wim Winters side by side, the discussion moves far beyond taste or personal preference. At stake is whether Mozart’s rhetoric, phrasing, rests, articulations, and musical narrative can still be heard at m...

In this episode, we confront a subject pianists rarely question: the damper pedal. We begin with a simple premise: what if Beethoven and Chopin were not vague about pedaling — but precise? What if the widespread modern habit of “continuous” pedal use is not an innocent evolution, but a structural shift that alters articulation, phrasing, and even tempo? Drawing on sources such as Carl Czerny’s Pia...

In this episode of The Authentic Sound Podcast , we return to a figure who has been systematically misunderstood: Carl Czerny. Most pianists know him as the composer of technical exercises. Few realise that he was: * Beethoven’s most important pupil * Franz Liszt’s teacher * The most influential piano pedagogue in 19th-century Europe * A composer of nearly 1000 opus numbers * A key transmitter of...

In this new episode, we return to a concept that is constantly invoked in 19th-century music — and just as constantly misunderstood today: tempo rubato. The word itself suggests freedom, flexibility, even licence. But when we look closely at historical sources, a very different picture emerges. Together, we ask a simple but uncomfortable question: what if much of what we now call rubato is not exp...

In this episode of the Authentic Sound Podcast , we turn to one of Beethoven’s most iconic piano sonatas: the Waldstein . Together, we explore a deceptively simple but far-reaching question: what actually happens to Beethoven’s music when tempo is “halved” by a modern reading of the metronome? Using detailed listening comparisons, we place Alberto Sanna’s whole-beat performance of the Waldstein al...

In this episode, we dive into one of the most striking and unsettling 19th-century testimonies on tempo, tradition, and modernity: William Mason’s recollections of Chopin, Liszt, and their musical world. Mason — an American pianist who studied with Moscheles, Liszt, and others shortly after Chopin’s death — stands at a unique historical crossroads. He had heard Chopin’s music played by people who...

What if one of the most beloved piano pieces ever written has been fundamentally misunderstood? In this episode of the Authentic Sound podcast, Stefan and Wim dive deep into the tempo problem surrounding Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen — and especially its most famous movement, Träumerei. Schumann was unusually precise in giving metronome markings for these “easy pieces for children,” yet performer...

In this episode, Stefan and I return to one of the most persistent misunderstandings in Chopin performance: tempo in dance-based music , and the consequences of treating it as something abstract rather than physical. Starting from Chopin’s ballroom—especially the waltz—we ask a simple but often ignored question: are we supposed to dance here, or are we supposed to fly? The distinction matters more...

In this episode of the Authentic Sound Podcast , Wim Winters and Stefan Pospiech take a deep dive into one of Chopin’s most iconic études: Op. 10 No. 9 in F minor , the famous left-hand étude — and into what happens when it is played at radically different tempos. Using Maurizio Pollini’s legendary recording as a reference point, Wim places it side by side with his own Whole Beat–based interpretat...

Chopin’s music was written for human hands — but increasingly, technology is stepping in to “help.” From robotic practice exoskeletons to AI-generated performance systems, the promise is always the same: more speed, more precision, fewer limitations. In this episode, we examine what that promise really means. Drawing on the broader Whole Beat discussion, we look at how modern performance culture t...

In this episode, Stefan and I take a close look at one of the most frequently cited — and perhaps most misunderstood — documents in the modern tempo debate: the anonymous “Fafner 1988” paper . The paper is often used in conservatories and academic discussions as evidence against Whole Beat thinking, because it collects historical concert durations and applies statistical reasoning to suggest how f...