Category: composers

Love of my life

I bought this when I was about 15 years old.

Love of my life
1980s edition of Rach 2, reduced for 2 pianos.

That wasn’t today or yesterday. In fact, it was about 35 years ago and I bought it in a music book shop in London. I would give anything to find it again but I suspect it doesn’t exist. In my memory, it was a branch of Oxford University Press but it was, above all other things, a dream world. It had floor to ceiling drawers with mysterious labels. Ladders to get to the higher drawers. Middle aged men having heart attacks as I searched for Rachmaninoff’s name on the drawers.

I wanted two things. This and something else called Grieg’s Piano Concerto. Both of them together were too expensive, so after some no doubt annoying humming and hahing in the shop, I chose Rach. I’m not going to say Rach 2 has always been my favourite piano concerto but I hadn’t heard Saint-Saens 5 by then and Rach 2 is currently my favourite piano concerto.

You can tell this is an old edition. It doesn’t have the standard pic of Rach on the front of which most of the Boosey and Hawkes editions of his concertos do. Also, it is extremely grubby.

I didn’t really realise how grubby it had got until I looked at it today. I took it a lot of places with me. I sat in cars, on rugs, at picnic tables, analysing it, listening to Julius Katchen’s iconic recording and picking out bits of it. We got that from the Great Composers back in the day, on cassette and I recommend it. It’s a tragedy he died so young. The tape lived in my Walkman for most of my teenage years except when I was listening to Jean-Michel Jarre.

One of the girls I knew at choir said the coda was very hard and I would never learn it. She didn’t know it was a coda but the notes were small and there were lots of them. My music teacher did not want to know about it. It’s not like there was an orchestra handy where I grew up. I’m not going to say I was actively discouraged but I definitely was not encouraged.

Looking back, I think this was a pity. Claire Huangci says she learned it at 14. I bet she was encouraged. It’s standard repertoire. There are any number of renditions of it on YouTube. God I would have loved YouTube as a teenager. I just had The Great Composers partworks in cassettes. I learned the opening chords, before I bought the sheet music, from the accompanying magazine. I think my mother donated those magazines. I may regret that now.

I started learning it the summer I was 17. I was doing exams; I had worked my tiny little heart out on chemistry French and maths for two years; I had 2 weeks off before my exams would start and at that point, I didn’t think there was much I could do to improve further my chances in the Leaving Certificate in 1990. I scored two As, 4 Bs and a C back in the day when that meant something (old woman shakes fist at sky about the simplification of the maths syllabus amongst other things) so I probably wasn’t far wrong on that. I knew my theorems and I was the first person in years to do the chemical equilibrium question at my school and I got it 100% correct. I’m not bragging here. I’m about to explain that what I engaged in for the study break was the greatest torture known to a family in Ireland whose piano was in the same room as the TV.

I started learning the second movement of Rach 2. It was in E, a key I preferred to C minor in general (this is still the case). I used to get up, have breakfast, fill a pint glass with Ribena, the sugar filled version, put it on top of the piano, open Rach 2 somewhere in the middle and repeat a few bars endlessly. I must have spent 5 or 6 hours on it on occasion. I have a very fuzzy memory now but I’m certain I had had afternoon practice sessions which lasted 4 hours or more. I cannot imagine the focus I had that allowed me to decipher the notes (sight reading is not my strongest point although it has improved lately), and get myself to a point where I could play around the first – well this is the question. If I look at where I think I stopped, I got about 4 minutes in before I hit the polyrhythms for which I had no help at all and never navigated. But I really didn’t realise it was that far. I almost definitely got about a minute and a half in. There are some notes in the script – not many because mostly I tend to put in things to help to get the rhythm right and after a few years of RIAM and the Leinster School of Music, I have a horror of notes on my script (so I’m totally out of sync with most musicians, it seems) and everything is carefully in by pencil.

Why are we talking about this today? Because I have heard people learning Rach 3 on Reddit and Rach 2 on Tonic and I realised, if they are doing it, why can’t I? I am sure I wrote a bit about some of the people learning Rach 3 and yet I cannot find it quickly. So squirrelled away at the back of my head is that I would pick up the piano concerto again. The same movement – I love it – and start seeing if I could reawaken the memory of what I was able to do when I was 17 years old, drinking Ribena by the pint class. Today, I took it out and looked at how godawful grubby it is. I have the Henle Urtext on my iPad as well but there is some sort of emotional connection between me now (better sight reader and with some tools to deal with polyrhythms) and a girl with a crazy unrealistic dream in a house in the middle of rural Ireland.

I cry tears for that girl sometimes. She had a lot of life before her; I know now what that life included and a lot of it didn’t include a piano which is perhaps a shame.

I can’t still play the first 4 minutes. But I can – almost at will – play the opening page without fault and I can make it sound heart breaking. There is something about I play that which is absent in how I play Mendelssohn, for example. You can pick up senses of it in the Rebikov that I play with affliction when the mood takes me. But the heartbreak in these notes by Rachmaninoff is on a different scale.

I should be learning other exam stuff. I can’t even say how far I will get with this piano concerto this time. It’s mostly way above my skill level when you look at the piece as a whole. But I am now 50, and I can do what I like and what I like at the moment involves pieces of the greatest piece of piano music ever written.

20240210 Practice Diary

This week, on Tonic, I was in the Gold list having gotten myself promoted a couple of weeks in a row. Now, playing with the big boys and girls. The ones who clearly don’t have full time jobs. * rueful smile.

I haven’t done today’s practice session yet so who knows this could change after I have done it. It was at best a mixed week. I missed at least one day because I was at a concert (a good reason, you would admit). But I also started a new job and much to my surprised this has resulted in me getting home later rather than earlier. I didn’t have so much time to practice, and also not so much time to listen in to other people practising.

So, in terms of what went well: the Mendelssohn is getting slightly more security; it’s not where I want yet but okay, there are no obvious weaknesses except when I am tired. The Rebikov is now more or less internalised but in some odd hybrid short/long term memory mess. This means some times I can play it under finger without one error; last night I spent a lot of time again trying to render a section of fluent, a section that I know intelleuctually in my mind but my fingers take on crab like features of their own and I watch as a C sharp/A figure turns into something akin to a diminished chord undescribed in no music theory text book; a flow of notes that my wrists do not wish to play even as I know in my mind what notes they are. More work is required. Nevertheless, despite being the last of the pieces I started learning, it is the second closest to ready.

For Elissa Milne’s Indigo Moon, I have struggled to memorise this. I would like all four pieces to be memorised so there’s work to be done here. I didn’t touch this for several months (and it shows) but although I can’t play it fluently at all, it is in reasonable health for the effort it got. With both Rebikov and Mendelssohn demanding less time over the coming month or two, I expect this to be okay as it was fluent at one point. The shapes are broadly okay for my fingers.

This leads us to the Bachs, Johann Sebastien and his son Carl Philipp Emmanuel. Invention in E major is out (I have no idea but it really wasn’t coming for me at al) and Solfeggio is in. The read through for that went okay, and the chunks of it getting touched in practice is about half the piece. This is a piece that I absolutely have to memorise – I cannot read at Prestissimo velocity – and it is a piece that demands work with a metronome. It is nowhere close to written speed and that will be a while. But it altogether feels more realistic than his father’s easy training piece. It will also feed into the Rameau I have lined up for after.

Outside that, there were two or three other pieces this week. Reddit’s Piano Jam for the month had a small waltz by Shostokovich so I read that through, and I’ve also been working on the infamous C Major prelude that is Fur Elise-sque in its popularity with being hacked to pieces and murdered screaming. I’m influenced by Alexandre Tharaud’s carefully pedalled recording. I am happy with how this is going although strangely enough I struggle to memorise it. But it is very easy to read. And just because I was super angry about the Bach invention last week and needed something more motivational, I have Handel’s Sarabande on the go, also easy to read, but I haven’t tried the couple of variations yet.

At some point I need to write a piece on sightreading and discuss all the can’t lose hints I keep seeing.

BRU: Flagey Capucon and Trifonov

Back in June, when I was at Kissin, I was browsing the upcoming dates for Flagey and noticed that Messers Gautier Capucon and Daniil Trifonov were coming to play some Rachmaninoff in February. It seemed a long long way off last June but the day finally arrived on 7 February.

I’m going to be frank here: Daniil Trifonov is, in my experience, the best live concert pianist bar none at the moment and I’ve seen Yuja Wang, Lang Lang and Evgeny Kissin and Daniel Barenboim and Khatia Buniatishvili. So I would go to watch him playing variations on a nursery rhyme or any of the pieces on my 40 pieces learning list. Gautier Capucon plays the cello which isn’t really my instrument but I seriously appreciated his daily pieces during Covid and I cannot deny that he is a superlative musician. I had wanted to catch him live for a while. So, concert date was basically a marriage made in heaven.

The programme consisted of Debussy and Prokofiev sonatas in the first half, and then Rachmaninoff in the second half. I am not at all familiar with either of the first half sonatas, which is my own fault. They are beautiful and contrasting in style; to my mind rather mournful. The playing was masterful – there is something very special about how Trifonov balanced the depth and might of the Model D Steinway to allow the cello to sing. I enjoyed it very much but really, I was there for the Rachmaninoff more than anything. It was on a far higher plane than either of the two first half pieces. I read a comment once that Rachmaninoff’s cello sonata was not really a cello sonata as such, but a sonata for piano and cello. I tend to agree with this, especially after Wednesday night. I think the piano part could stand alone as a sonata in its own right; it has also many, many little sketches that you find littered around his concertos. Quotes, if you like.

On Wednesday, the two musicians played as equals. Where in the Prokofiev and Debussy, the piano very much tended to the accompaniment, in the Rachmaninoff, it was an equal partner in the endeavour. I loved it. Everyone around me loved it. I resolved to find the sheet music because I wanted to learn it.

There were two encores, Vocalise by Rachmaninoff and the Dance of the Knights by Prokofiev. The latter was particularly striking – I would like ot learn that too but it’s not something that my precious little Kawai digital will be able to fit. I’m also not sure if there’s a piano transcription currently available. I need to check.

With all due respect to the cellists amongst us, for me the highlight was the piano playing. I first saw Trifonov playing Rach 2 about 7 years ago in the Philharmonie in Luxembourg – I had no idea who he was but I would go to any concert of Rach 2 that I happen across. He does things with a piano that I lack the capacity to describe; but he makes me feel, oh how he makes me feel. I was so glad I did not miss him this time (I wound up on a waitlist for him last year). I really hope next year he comes back and plays a concerto with one of the orchestras here in Brussels. I would love to see him in that context again. Gautier Capucon will be back to do a masterclass at the Elisabeth Chapel in Waterloo in March.

All told, a wonderful evening. For the Rachmaninoff, Gautier has a recording with Yuja Wang. It is beautiful but far from being the same experience; the piano is some steps back and of course, nothing matches the sound of a grand piano in the flesh.

New listening

Lucas Debargue has an upcoming album of Fauré’s complete piano music. Apple has been dropping tasters and it really is rather attractive. This arrived during the week.

I already have some Fauré on my TBL list, one of the romances from Opus 17. It’s been on my list for a while (that’s Alexandre Tharaud’s responsibility) and I even have the sheet music. I think it is also on the 40 pieces list but I am working (sort of) through the easy ones, Anyway, the music for this appears to be available via Barenreiter too. I’m not sure I want to buy any more music just yet though (this does not mean I won’t).

New Sheet Music: Brahms 79 – 2 Rhapsodies

I listen to Brahms while working and discovered Radu Lupu’s recording of assorted opuses including Opus 79. I really like the second rhapsody from Op 79 so I bought it lately, Henle (so blue edition), nothing spectacular photowise.

It’s on the syllabus for the ARSM which is on my radar, although I was also targetting 118/2 for that (no work done on it this week). I’ll think about it. I had a look at it briefly yesterday at the end of a practice session. It was challenging to say the least.

If you ask me who my favourite composer is, I would still say Rachmaninoff. But I seem to own more music by Chopin and Brahms for some strange reason.

Markings and Military Polonaise

Someone found some sheet music at a brocante a few weeks ago and picked up a couple of pieces for me. 2 Polonaises, Opus 40 was one of them.

Military Polonaise
Sheet music for Chopin’s Opus 40, a couple of polonaises

I kind of like that the editor was Henry Litolff. But that’s by away of an aside.

ON a separate but related note, lately, I have been fighting an internal battle on the question of markings. Fingerings. Emphasises and things like this. Basically, when I was a child doing RIAM exams, there was a painful experience of many months attempting to decipher a piece of music, convert it into something remotely recognisable. My piano teacher had a pencil, and what I considered old lady handwriting at the time. My exam books tended to get covered in pencil markings around fingerings and the notes that I consistently misread, and much more than anything, the dynamic markings. A week before the exam, an eraser was carefully applied and the markings all removed. To this day, I hate marking sheet music with any markings at all. This, from what I can see is completely counter to the practices I see around the internet. I sat through practice planning with ToneBase lately and someone noted that of course you should keep your markings, why would you DO all that work and not be able to access it if you set the piece aside and wanted to come back to it months or even years later.

I see the logic. But I don’t want to write on it so my markings tend to go on my digital copies of the music on my iPad. And I am clearly just not used to it.

What does this have to do with Chopin? Well, when I opened the sheet music pictured above, I see the markings. They are (this is awfully familiary) in pencil. And I can only read some of them.

Military Polonaise
Forte?
Military Polonaise
Molto forte?

There are definitely far fewer markings than was on my K545 back in the day. I’ve never tried this. I should.

From what I can see, the person who used this before I got my hands on it only played No 1. There are no markings on No 2.

I’ve found that between this and the couple of second hand sheets I bought myself lately (Hummel and Guastevino amongst other things), I’m starting to get fascinated by it. I’d love to know about more second hand sheet music shops.

Here’s a video of the piece

BRU: Flagey: Rachmaninoff150 Day #01

The Brussels Phiiharmonic and Flagey are running a series of Rachmaninoff concerts to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth and while I will miss the two concerts dedicated to the second and third piano concertos, this weekend included the first and fourth along with And Supporting Pieces. I will pick up Piano Concerto No 1 along with Rimsky Korskakov’s Scheherazade later today but I want to post briefly about last night’s concert. Details of the festival are here.

The soloist is Boris Giltburg, artist in residence in Flagey at the moment as I understand it. He is a Moscow born Israeli pianist in his late 30s and for some reason, last night was the first time I had come across his work. This surprises me. He was excellent. Last night he chose to play a Fazioli and I think this is the first time that I have seen a piano that was not a Steinway or a Yamaha in years. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t see a Steinway. I like Faziolis so this pleased me. And I was in Row B. I know they are somewhat of the cheap seats and “the sound is better further back”. But. I like to watch the soloist and in this respect, Boris Giltburg is definitely worth watching.

The programme for last night was the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, An American in Paris by Gershwin and then, the fourth piano concerto, sometimes the forgotten of the four brothers, as it were, often overshadowed by the Symphonic Dances (which if it was programmed near me this year I somehow endeavoured to miss which is a pity because that is a mighty piece).

The Paganini was superlative. There isn’t really any other way to describe it and I doubt any other performance will match it for pure power and delicacy. I suspect the piano in part had something to do with that – for me, the piano personifies a river running through the countryside of the orchestra for that piece (and sometimes that countryside is frozen, covered in frost and snow with ice on the surface of occasional pools of still water) and the sound of the Fazioli definitely enhanced that image for me. Equally, the fourth piano concerto was an outstanding performance – it is hardly surprising that Giltburg picked up standing ovations for both performances and will probably pick up a few more customer’s for today’s concert this afternoon. I liked him very much; he provided one encore from the Moments Musicaux, one with which I am less familiar but glitteringly beautiful nonetheless.

Touching on the Gershwin, I have to confess he is not really my favourite, and I couldn’t actually remember ever listening to An American in Paris but I must have because it was extremely familiar to me. Maybe I heard it quite often when I was very young. That being said, the performance last night was top flight. I’m left with the feeling that in the repertoire, this should be performed much more often. I would also tend to suggest that it is a piece that really bears being heard live rather than in recorded format.

After the concert, there was an Aftertalk, questions and answers with the conductor and the soloist. It was something I’ve never experienced before but I have to say it was fascinating. It touched on the challenges for both composers, the changes Rach made to the fourth piano concerto a couple of years before he died, how it fitted into his dire for American citizenship before he died. The presenter prior to the concert suggested this was a jazzy concerto and in discussion afterwards, I would venture to suggest that isn’t quite right, at least in the final revisions; I learned there are elements of jazz impro in the first edition of the concerto. But for me, again, it evokes snowy scenery rather than the jazz view of the United States o the 20s. Emigrés fall between several cultures and I suspect Rach is no different in that.

On the question of Gershwin it was pointed out that he wanted to be taken seriously by the classical establishment; that he had been an immensely musical theatre composer – I have heard this store more recently of course with Andrew Lloyd Webber. In Europe at least, Gershwin is seen as a great composer and has been for the last 40 years at least. Giancarlo Guerrero, who conducted, is fascinating in this discussion and he notes that in the US, Gershwin is still seen as lesser despite this being the first great American symphonic piece. It’s an interesting perspective and that discussion is one why those after concert discussions can be fascinating and extremely fascinating.

Anyway, I came home and took out the 18th Variation transcription for solo piano and had a go at it again. My god it is so lovely, I should put more work into it, despite the Bach two part invention that stands before me like an undesirable but necessary Everest (once I am past that, Bach will be carefully selected rather than imposed).

7 October, Rachmaninoff with the Brussels Philharmonic, Guerrero and Giltburg.

Sur Mer

Following a Rachmaninoff related mishap with my right hand last week, and a rather stupid insistence on continuing to practice through some discomfort, I am now taking a short break from playing the piano in the hope that sometime next week, I will be back at it with my Gondolalied and Bach Invention Number Tortuous.

In the meantime, I keep finding pieces that I want to learn, random but amazing pieces. This is one.

Sur Mer by Felix Blumenfeld, played by Daniel Blumenthal.

I should probably listen to all of that album, this one track is already amazing. It’s probably far beyond my skills at the moment (given my skill consists of being stuffed by Rach right now…) I hope that Felix’s chords aren’t anywhere near as challengingly big.

Rather annoyingly, I don’t find a published print of it at the moment but it is out of copyright so IMSLP has it. You can find it here. I had a look on Abebooks for it and found one seller in Germany but the quoted price was over 60 dollars. I don’t pay that for brand new sheet music books and I’m not sure I want this one at that price when I won’t be starting it for a good while and have some other things to do [I’m wondering if it is acceptable for Grade 8 but since I can’t find a published print I think I will struggle to use it].

The opening bars put me in mind of a great naval ship (sailing, 19th century) racing across the ocean, with the occasional encounter with someone else’s great naval ship. I love those opening bars, those arpeggios.