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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!
I hope you don't mind me sharing this here. It's me playing Mozart K.330 on a Steinway B (which, I have to say, was terrible!) at the University of Alabama back in April
PS: The piano was terrible not because it's a Steinway but because it has been completely neglected. It hasn't been regulated in 10 years....
I wonder though, at 1:15, did you notice a leak in the roof?
Do you want the artistic answer or the real answer? Artistic answer: I was contemplating the cantilena style of Mozart and preparing myself to sing through my fingers, and hoping to embody something of the spirit of Mozart and 18th Century Vienna.
Real answer: My neck and shoulders were a bit tight that day and I took a quick stretch before I played.
Really well done. Very romantic and expressive. Mozart is so hard and that sonata is quite difficult to pull off, especially that second movement. Schnabel's famous quote about Mozart applies to this sonata for sure.
“The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists.” Artur Schnabel
Wonderful performance, Joe! I agree with Schnabel re Mozart, but you made it look and sound effortless.
"Music, rich, full of feeling, not soulless, is like a crystal on which the sun falls and brings forth from it a whole rainbow" - F. Chopin "I never dreamt with my own two hands I could touch the sky" - Sappho
Thank you everyone, I'm very happy that you enjoyed the performance. Keith, I'm glad you picked up on it being romantic, a lot of other people have said the same thing. Honestly, I didn't set out to make a romantic performance, but this is genuinely how I feel this work. I studied with a student of Karl Ulrich Schnabel and he apparently allowed for romantic performances of Mozart so long as the proportions were well thought out. Unfortunately I never met Karl Ulrich myself.
RSchnabel's famous quote about Mozart applies to this sonata for sure.
“The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists.”
I've never heard this quote before, but I love it. It makes me think of Bach, perhaps on a tangential track, as being too difficult for children, and also too difficult for artists?
Thank you. I've looked through your YouTube channel and I think you're doing very well! You structure your phrases very well, which is rare in any beginner of any age, and you have a good touch. I say beginner, you're already on early intermediate repertoire which isn't actually all that easy!
My teacher puts it a little differently. "It is music for children, but to play it requires a mature technique."
Maybe true, there is a childlike simplicity in Mozart. There is also a deep artistry in it, a sense of craft that makes it difficult to play without understanding Mozart's other works. A lot of people think that piano sonatas are merely teaching pieces, but I disagree. We know that they were, in some cases, written for amateurs to play. He said so himself in his letters. He composed some of them to be well within reach of amateur players, but he also used composition techniques that were designed to satisfy the connoisseurs. The six early sonatas are an exploration of style, and there is contained in them a great deal of the keyboard styles that were in vogue at that time. The other layer is that they are all very operatic. Even as Mozart kind of slimmed down his writing style, thinning it out in favor of more brilliance, the operatic style became ever more prominent. It's actually hard to play all these runs in an operatic style, but my solution is to basically not play too fast, and play quite expressively without (hopefully) disrupting the structure. This K.330 sonata in particular is extremely operatic, and at every point I was thinking about which character was singing, how they were singing it, what their mood was, and perhaps I captured some of that in the performance, that's for others to decide. What I didn't do was think about piano technique or playing pianistically, and I didn't spend much time thinking about how it would have sounded on a fortepiano, because that's not so interesting to me although I know it's important.
Joseph, I am very glad that you posted this! It is beautifully played.
Originally Posted by Joseph Fleetwood
The other layer is that they are all very operatic. Even as Mozart kind of slimmed down his writing style, thinning it out in favor of more brilliance, the operatic style became ever more prominent. It's actually hard to play all these runs in an operatic style, but my solution is to basically not play too fast, and play quite expressively without (hopefully) disrupting the structure. This K.330 sonata in particular is extremely operatic, and at every point I was thinking about which character was singing, how they were singing it, what their mood was, and perhaps I captured some of that in the performance, that's for others to decide. What I didn't do was think about piano technique or playing pianistically, and I didn't spend much time thinking about how it would have sounded on a fortepiano, because that's not so interesting to me although I know it's important.
I could not agree more about the importance for the pianist of familiarity with and understanding of Mozart's operas.
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