Many composers are viewed through the lens of their creative periods, but none more so than Beethoven. The concept of his “three periods” has become an inescapable paradigm for musicians and listeners alike, so much so that whenever we hear a work by Beethoven, we rush, even if subconsciously, to assign a period label to […]
Many of our most beloved works are experienced by listeners and musicians on emotional and mental levels. The two are not in the least contradictory, and we can admire one work for its moving melodiousness and another for its architectural qualities. How often, though, are we physically enthralled by a work of music? Are there […]
Were we to walk in on a performance of the Diabelli Variations as the ninth variation comes to its melodramatic end and the pianissimo figures that open the tenth variation start trickling down the keyboard, we would not be too far off if guessing that what we hear is a transcription of a finale to an act […]
Two things I am not: an expert on film and an interpreter of Chopin. Having played Chopin extensively as a teenager, I eventually came to the conclusion that although I’m second to none in my love and admiration for the composer, I simply lack the innate sense of rhythm and phrasing needed to play good […]
In the last three entries I dealt with Brahms’s Op. 76 cycle, a quintessentially anti-programmatic work, propelled solely by its own development and needing no extramusical content to accompany it. The subject of this post, Suisse, Liszt’s first volume of Années de pèlerinage, is the polar opposite of that. When I first came to study in London […]
Anyone who wishes to listen to Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony without hearing any applause between the third movement and the mournful finale should probably look for a studio recording, as applauding after the third movement has become an established tradition, so much so that one finds it hard to imagine the beginning of the Adagio lamentoso preceded by […]
Some years ago, in a masterclass with the renowned American pianist and teacher Jerome Lowenthal, I played Rachmaninoff’s beautiful E-flat minor Étude-Tableaux Op. 39/5. After I finished playing, he pointed his finger at the first page and asked me: “Harmonically, what’s going on here?” Although I thought I was quite adept in harmony, I found […]
The next three posts are about Brahms’s cycle of Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 76. Published in 1879, it marked a beginning and an end for Brahms: the end of a hiatus in writing for piano solo and the beginning of Brahms’s new style of writing for piano, where cycles of small miniatures supplanted the earlier […]
Many of the works I ended up playing, or just works that became some of my favorites, I initially didn’t quite like or understand. Sometimes, I decide to play a piece as soon as I hear it. At other times, however, a work may fail to arouse my interest at first hearing, but then I […]
The Andante Favori was initially intended to be the second movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata, but it ended up as a standalone work. Had it been the second movement of the muscular and heroic “Waldstein,” it would have inevitably been compared to the outer movements, but fortunately, as a separate work, we can focus on its qualities without drawing any comparisons.