Knowing the Score.

Knowing the Score, by Malcolm Bilson. Cornell University Press Services (P.O. Box 6525, 750 Cascadilla St., Ithaca, New York 14851).

Here's the DVD that will free you from tyranny! All those years of respecting exactly what's on the page in your trusted editions may have skewered your beliefs about how to interpret and teach the music. This has been authenticated by the in-person and recorded performances of artists who subscribe to the theory of phrasing systematized by Hugo Riemann nearly 125 years ago. Now here comes Malcolm Bilson, an enthusiastic revolutionary who will challenge many maxims you have come to accept as gospel--and he does so with such convincing sense and good humor that you enjoy being provoked.

A lecture-demonstration, with a live audience, is the meat of Knowing the Score. Most of the scores discussed are by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, but there are also examples from the music of Chopin, Johann Strauss, Prokofiev and Bartok. You can listen to the entire lecture or choose specific "chapters."

The production values are superb. The music examples fill the entire screen, measure by measure, as Bilson plays and speaks or when you hear performances by major artists, comparing interpretations (and how wildly different some of these are!). You see audience reactions and individuals who ask questions appear on screen and are identified by captions.

The cream of the "extras" is the stimulating and extended conversation between Bilson and David Owen Norris in Bilson's home studio, where both men play and compare three Viennese instruments (two copies, one original) and a copy of a 1799 Longman and Clementi. You see inside some of these as they are played. The special treat is hearing Bilson and Norris alternate phrases, on two different Viennese pianos, of the Schubert B-flat Major Impromptu (D 935).

Other extras include performances by Bilson in the Music Room of the Esterhaza Castle and the Brahmssaal of the Musikverein in Vienna, a bibliography, a Bilson discography and biographies of Bilson and Norris. You can choose to read the subtitles in English, French or German.

Did you know: Upbeats are always short and light? Unmarked quarter-notes are never held their full length? The tone on a Steinway actually swells before it begins to diminish? Grupetti are always played slightly faster than written? And--big news to most teachers--fingering should be part of what students learn to do at home, not something that is dictated by the teacher or editor. This DVD is a revelation--and a revolution? Reviewed by Marienne Uszler, San Juan Capistrano, California.