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77.111.247.60
In Reply to: RE: Dubbing it in? Two pianos, 3 hands? : ) The trick for me is having someone else play it while I listen. nt posted by jdaniel@jps.net on July 12, 2020 at 10:40:42
. . . you would see immediately what the trick was - especially if I slowed the tempo way down! ;-)
Here's a pretty broad hint though (below - from the cadenza in the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, starting with the upbeat to measure 564). Think: how would this apply to the passage you showed in Beethoven's Op. 111? ;-)
Come to think of it, there are probably more than a few videos on YouTube where "the secret" of playing that Beethoven passage is revealed in regular video performances where they show the hands at that spot.
Follow Ups:
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There are similar passages in the last movement of the Waldstein Sonata too!
The dropping of individual trill notes to bring out the melody notes will NEVER be heard by the audience. ;-)
(though not by me)
. . . by a general sense of the pianist's discomfort and effortful execution in trying to play the score as originally notated. I guarantee that they will not hear the isolated "missing" trill notes every now and then in the "trick" execution. Why? Because the trill is going so fast and melody notes cover those individual trill notes when they coincide anyway. That's the beauty of the trick fingering in this case!
There are some other "optimistic" notations on Beethoven's part, such as the requirement for octave glissandos in one hand (!) near the end of the Waldstein Sonata - and here, I don't know of any means to get around it. (You have to fold your thumb with the fingernail down on the key for the lower note of the octave in the right hand (upper note when the passage moves to the left hand), and then stretch out your pinkie just about as far as it will go to get the upper note of the octave - trouble is, you can't play that upper note with any part of your finger, other than the "fleshy" part, which doesn't lend itself to glissando execution.) You could jump up with the other (left) hand and play a parallel scale with the right hand - in fact, the well-known musicologist/theoretician, Heinrich Schenker, suggested exactly this manner of simplification, and I used to play in this this manner myself when I was studying the work. But then it doesn't SOUND like a glissando that way (and in any case, it violates Beethoven's own fingering of thumb and pinkie on every note (finger numbers 1 and 5), and it would be easy for listeners to spot just by listening. (Actually, I think I've heard this execution anyway on a couple of recordings.) But with this particular difficulty of Beethoven's original notation, I've noticed that, over the time I've been listening to this sonata, pianists have seemed to get better and better at the "one-hand octave glissando", although you can still hear how difficult it is on a lot of recordings.
Here's Schenker's edition of the Waldstein in this particular spot. The trouble starts in measure 464. Notice how his "usual simiplification" leaves out the octave doublings for much of the passage - even if one doesn't read music, you'll notice that there are notes missing in the "usual simplification". ;-)
BTW, that pedal marking you see in upper r.h. corner is for the staff above (which you can't see) - the staffs are printed so closely together in Schenker's edition (originally published by Universal, but now easily available from Dover publishers) that I couldn't exclude it from my "cut and paste".
Another bad thing about this passage is that you can easily tear the skin off your thumb cuticle practicing it repeatedly. (I can tell you from experience!) I read that Gilels used to use baby powder or talcum powder to try to avoid this. Other pianists use band-aids on their thumbs for the same reason.
I could rattle off the bass line w/o breaking a sweat. Like Till Eulenspiegel but more notes ;-}
What's the tempo?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be
Oh! You mean on the trombone? Yeah, I concede your point! ;-)
Anyway, here's Pletnev in this passage:
View YouTube Video
Czerny says that the tempo in the coda is whole note = 88, and that the octave passages here must be played by gliding the fingers along the keys (i.e., as a glissando, as I described in the previous post). I actually think that Pletnev is going too slow here, but other pianists avoid the glissandi and therefore must go even slower. The funny thing is that, even though this passage is executed as a glissando, it doesn't actually sound like a glissando, at least as most of know it.
BTW, why do I quote Czerny? He was a student of Beethoven, and these descriptions come from his "On the Proper Performance of Beethoven's Works for the Piano" from his Op. 500 (!). Czerny actually heard Beethoven play these works, so I'm deferring to him!
I've always said the Piano is the easiest instrument to play badly and the most difficult to play well.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be
so that it was easier in 1820 than on later instruments.
And Beethoven had some pretty big hands.
The hands do look big from the plaster cast, but without some kind of scale (not a musical scale, but a ruler or something), it's a little hard to tell for sure.
,
,
He seems to be a hard drivin' guy! (Which would work well with most of these works!)
For Op. 111, my current fav is Pogo (from back in the days when he could actually play!).
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