Wanda at the window: The only known film of Landowska

David K. Nelson says:

Many years ago I had the interesting experience of attending an informal gathering in a home where the esteemed keyboard artist Ton Koopman, who was in town in play a concert, played some things for a select groups and then talked or answered questions from a roomful of mostly period instrument practitioners and Historically Informed Performance devotees. He was asked about Wanda Landowska in terms which suggested the questioner (and I suspect most others in the room) hoped that Koopman would trash her style and her instrument to support their own biases but that he resolutely refused to do, other than to say that when playing the contemporary repertoire that she commissioned for harpsichord that the music really demanded and needed the larger heavy Pleyel harpsichord she used.

But he did say that he had carefully studied photographs of her hands at the keyboard over the years and arrived at the conclusion that she deliberately had them take on a sort of talon-like arch of the hand and fingers for such photographs in order to confound pianists/harpsichordists as to just how she could play so fluently holding her fingers like that, and he, Koopman, suspected her actual physical approach to the instrument in performance did not look much like those photos. I do not know if he had ever seen this film, which at times directly supports and refutes his theory, but I think he had a point about a certain exaggerated quality to the hand posture in her publicity photographs, just as there is to her style of dress and even her facial expressions.

Perhaps it is my own bias as a (non-HIP) violinist but I think her finest playing on commercial recordings is the Bach Sonata in E with Yehudi Menuhin done for RCA Victor. There is also a marvelous photograph portrait by Yousef Karsh of the two of them.