Innehållsförteckning för 137 från Pianist

‘Thank goodness spring is here,’ I thought, as I looked out onto the garden one morning in early March, watching my cat weave his way through the daffodils. Spring brings the promise of new life. The dispelling of cold, hard winter, and the welcome arrival of flowers and birdsong and longer days, have always inspired humans to make art and music. Inside this issue I have gathered an eclectic selection of scores painting springtime in music. Mendelssohn, Liszt and Grieg all pay tribute to spring itself; other pieces evoke woodlands, daffodils and sunsets. The sharp-eyed among you may wonder, ‘Where’s the Rustle of Spring’? Having included it in Pianist 102, I gave some lesser-known pieces their place in the sun, but Sinding’s classic miniature does appear on Leon McCawley’s latest…

Many pieces contain challenging spots that require special attention. The temptation to hack away at them until they yield is usually an unsuccessful and frustrating ploy; instead, we might find creative solutions by getting into the habit of making up our own exercises based around the material from the piece. Very often, the difficulty lies not so much in the mechanics of its execution but from a lack of perception about the structure of the passage, its internal workings and its musical meaning. Exploring the passage by inventing a series of exercises can help clarify the composer’s patterns, while at the same time building up technical security. In this article, I will present some ideas using examples from the repertoire. If you are struggling to find the delicacy of touch…

ABILITY RATING INTERMEDIATE Key G major Tempo ‘Lightly, almost jauntily’ Style Romantic Will improve your ✓ Pedalling ✓ Voicing ✓ Phrasing It was MacDowell’s ‘exquisite harmonies’ that Massenet rated particularly highly. ‘In the Woods’ offers a glimpse of this feature, plus a few other characteristics of MacDowell’s trademark style. It comes from the collection Six Idyls after Goethe (1887, revised 1901). The set dates from the composer’s period in Wiesbaden, Germany, during which he tried to focus predominantly on composition rather than teaching. Unsurprisingly, it proved a crucial time for the formation of MacDowell’s style and produced several works that are evidence of an ongoing engagement with his own music, as the later revisions of pieces from this period demonstrate. MacDowell’s metronome mark hints at the pace and feel of…

Though he is perhaps best known as a choral composer, Charles Villiers Stanford also wrote fine keyboard pieces. Born in Dublin, educated at Cambridge and Trinity, and a student of Reinecke, Stanford was a leading light in the revival of British music at the turn of the century. His Six Sketches set dates from 1918; No 1 appeared in issue 72 and No 3 in issue 78. In total, the whole set takes just six minutes to perform! Playing tips: A form of English folk dance, the Morris dance is based on rhythmic stepping and the execution of choreographed figures by a group of dancers in costume, usually wearing bell pads on their shins and/or shoes. So maintain a good tempo in order to bring out the rhythmic quality of…

Alfred Tofft was a Danish composer and newspaper critic. At the age of 20 he decided on a career in music, and gave his debut as organist and composer at the Saint John Church, Copenhagen. He later became chairman of the Danish Composers Union and the copyright organisation KODA. Tofft primarily wrote vocal music, but he did pen some lovely works for piano. This piece appears in the 3 Stemningsbilleder (Atmospheric pictures) Op 46. Playing tips: Shape the RH melody, allowing for rubato at the ends of phrases, and always creating a warm tone. The LH accompaniment requires a quick movement from the bass note to the next chord, so make sure your hand remains close to the keys. An intimate middle section appears at bat 17 – notice how…

Tchaikovsky was in the midst of writing Swan Lake in 1875 when the editor of the Russian music magazine Nouvellist commissioned him to write The Seasons – one solo piano piece for each month, appearing in the magazine in its respective month. The ‘Song of the Lark’ subtitle to March (No 3) was added by the publisher. Nearly all of the other pieces have appeared in past issues (they are well-suited to the intermediate-level pianist) – such is the popularity of The Seasons. Playing tips: Take your cue from the fact that the melody is depicting birdsong – albeit a rather melancholic and mellow-sounding lark! Try to play the staccato semiquavers from bar 12 by lightly ‘flicking’ your fingertips towards you (think of the jeu perlé touch), while the numerous…

Starting with a modest collection, originally written in the 1860s as teaching pieces for his own use, Grieg’s Lyric Pieces eventually grew to ten sets. After an initial 18-year gap between Op 12 and Op 38, Grieg completed a volume every two or three years until 1901; then deliberately closed the cycle with a final piece (‘Remembrances’ Op 71 No 7) based on the very first (‘Arietta’ Op 12 No 1). Some of the Lyric Pieces capture a mood, while others paint a picture, as the movements featured in this issue exemplify. ‘Little Bird’ Op 43 No 4 is a vivid and characterful depiction of its eponymous feathered hero going about his business, while ‘To Spring’ Op 43 No 6, is a warm, radiant evocation of the freshness and optimism…

Heart pangs Warwick Thompson’s article in issue 136 on the afterlife of our beloved pianos touched my spirit. This last year we moved from Ottawa to Vancouver Island – essentially a cross country journey. I could not leave my harps behind but my beloved pianos needed new homes. The player piano regretfully went to a dump after a year on consignment, the two pump organs found loving homes and fortunately our two baby grands ended up in the hands of loving players. All lost to us, but making room for new instruments at our destination. We settled on a Geirhard Heintzman piano which tinkles and growls. I wish I could have provided a safe haven for all of them, of course. Cindy Cripps-Prawak, BC, Canada What happened to the waltz?…

I’m listening to some Variations on a Theme of Paganini, but not as you’ve ever heard them before. It’s well-trodden ground, or so you’d think; Brahms, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Lutosławski and Andrew Lloyd Webber have aIl been here before. This version, however, sounds at times like Conlon Nancarrow on acid, so effervescent and off-the-wall that you can’t quite believe an actual human being is playing it. There are unmistakable references to Rachmaninov, a sudden chunk of Beethoven’s Op 109, and a variation in which musical meanderings are interrupted repeatedly by snippets of tonal cadences. The mix of inventiveness, inquisitiveness and humour in this music is something unique, written and played by Marc-André Hamelin. Given the historic tradition of pianists composing or improvising – and these arts were scarcely separated until the…

LESSONS FROM THE EXPERTS MELANIE SPANSWICK is a pianist, writer, teacher and composer. She has published over 25 books including the best-selling three-book piano course, Play It Again: PIANO (Schott), as well as the more recent series, Women Composers – A Graded Anthology For Piano (Schott), which won the 2022 Presto Music Award for ‘Best New Series of the Year’. Melanie teaches the piano at Junior Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Eton College. Read Melanie Spanswick’s lesson NILS FRANKE is Dean of Higher Education at the University Centre Colchester, UK, having previously held posts at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and the University of Reading. He has recorded for Warner and Brilliant Classics. Nils specialises in historical performance pedagogy, with a particular focus on…

ABILITY RATING ADVANCED Key A major Tempo Allegretto grazioso Style Romantic Will improve your ✓Arpeggiated chords ✓Phrasing ✓Voicing This glorious, open-hearted piece remains ever-popular with performers and audiences alike. And for good reason. Its long melodic line and magical harmonies convey all the optimism and magic of spring, all contained in a modest few pages of music representing Mendelssohn at his finest. Composed in 1842, in Denmark Hill, London, it is one of numerous pieces in the genre of Songs without Words that Mendelssohn composed for solo piano. These pieces were variously aimed at pianists of all abilities and they range from the technically approachable to the technically highly challenging! The main technical challenge with all these Songs without Words is to balance the melody against the accompaniment. You are…

Notes from the composer: Glorious Day is essentially in the key of F minor, even if it sounds rather sunny and slightly major! F minor contains a key signature of four flats, which have all been written into the score for easy learning. The flowing theme consists of eight-bar phrases, and the tempo marking of a dotted crotchet equals 120 beats per minute (with the Allegro marking) should work well. In order for the fingers to flit over the keys swiftly, a helpful practice tool to assimilate note-patterns and fingerings with ease is the ‘blocking-out’ technique: simply play each bar as one chord. In fact, for this particular piece, two bars can be ‘blocked-out’ together, as each hand plays the same notes one octave apart. For example, the RH plays…

One often associates German composer Cornelius Gurlitt with easy, rather ‘plain’ repertoire. However, this delightful set of six pieces, entitled Spring Flowers, is anything but mundane! The set was first published in 1896, ‘Daffodil’ featuring as the fifth piece. Playing tips: This pretty waltz in B minor should remain light and graceful throughout. The RH starts with the melody and the LH is the accompanist – though the LH does take on a second melody at bar 17 (and again on the repeats). Take note of the dynamics and the graceful poco ritardandos which will add a further dance-like lilt. The LH has some quick leaps to master – such as those at bars 5-6 and 13-14. Make sure to have the fifth finger ready for the leap, and keep…

TRACK 8INTERMEDIATE With the theme of springtime running through this issue, ‘In The Woods’ might capture a dewy spring day. Presented here is the poem by Goethe on which the piece is based. Read Nils Franke’s lesson. Through the woodland glades,One springtide fair,I wandered idly,With ne’er a care. I stopped to pluckA tiny flower,When lo! it sighedFrom out it’s bower. “Why break my lifeAn idle hour?To fade and wasteMy woodland dower.” Then to my heartI took the flower,With tender handAnd love’s soft power. And there it bloomsForever fair,For love is ours,With ne’er a care.…

WATCH CHENYIN LI PLAY THIS AT WWW.PIANISTMAGAZINE.COM Grieg’s third volume of Lyric Pieces was written and published in 1886 and consists of six pieces, of which ‘To Spring’ – a fantastic showpiece for pianists to conquer – appears as the last. The Op 43 volume contains some of Grieg’s most descriptively titled Lyrics, such as ‘Butterfly’ (Sommerfugl), ‘Solitary traveller’ (Ensom vandrer), ‘In my homeland’ (I hjemmet), ‘Little bird’ (Liten fugl) – which appears a few pages earlier – and ‘Erotikon’ (Erotikk). Matthew Mills’s article on the Lyric Pieces features playing tips on ‘To Spring’.…

YIRUMA SOLO: EASY & ORIGINAL Faber In 2021, Lee Ru Ma (a.k.a. Yiruma) released an album titled Solo to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his debut as a composer. Faber have now published the authorised scores for the 14 pieces on that album in two versions: the taupe-coloured ‘Original’ book (Grades 6-8) presents the music as played by Yiruma, whilst the blue-covered ‘Easy’ book includes the same pieces arranged for pianists around Grades 3-5. Yiruma has chosen not to add any fingering or pedalling indications but some of his most popular pieces, such as ‘River Flows in You’, and ‘Kiss the Rain’ are included and all the music features his characteristic easy-listening melodious style that effectively expresses a mood or scene of nature. An ideal resource to discover this composer.…

Congratulations to Isabel Morrison who has won a Kawai piano. Morrison delighted the judges with her quirky composition, Comme vous voulez. A long-term subscriber, Morrison teaches the piano in Northumberland (UK) where she has run a well-established piano practice for over 40 years. ‘I have been receiving Pianist since it first came out and I still have almost every copy!’ This was not the first time Morrison entered. ‘I’ve tried on two occasions before – one with an original composition, Forget-me-not, and the other with a piano arrangement of a Charles Aznavour song. I am absolutely speechless that I’ve won this time!’ Morrison has always enjoyed composing, over the years writing short piano pieces, one or two songs/choral works, recorder music for use in festival competitions, and so on. Perfect…

HOW TO PLAY Sight-reading is always a hot topic – and rightly so. The more dependable our level of skill, the quicker we can decide whether to learn a new piece or cast it aside. Into the bargain we become more useful as members of the piano-playing community, whether it be to accompany someone playing music previously unseen, enjoy duets or chamber/group-based music. Teachers possessing good sight-reading skills feel more quickly able to help pupils who bring along unfamiliar music. In short, the skill of sight-reading adds invaluable spontaneity to our music-making and opens the door to innumerable possibilities. Although there’s a fair amount of published material out there on developing sight-reading, such as Alan Bullard’s Joining The Dots series and Paul Harris’s Improve Your Sight-Reading, there’s comparatively little help…

ABILITY RATING ELEMENTARY Key C major Tempo Andante Style 20th century Will improve your ✓ Short phrasing ✓ Chromatic chords ✓ Rhythmic pulse Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. And yet he wrote a considerable number of pedagogical piano pieces for beginners and elementary players. This tranquil piece appears as No 2 in the first of a four-volume set of short pieces entitled For Children. Marked Andante, the suggested speed of a crotchet equals 88 beats per minute allows the music to flow without feeling too rushed. Sunrise is mostly constructed in eight-bar phrases. Mark these with a pencil. It’s worth noting that the first phrase between bars 1-8 is repeated at bars 9-16, but on second hearing features chromatic…

On these pages, Pianist covers the most basic stages of learning through a series of lessons by Hans-Günter Heumann. The two facing pages contain eight exercises from Le Couppey’s L’ABC du Piano. They are perfect for getting the fingers in shape. Eight exercises from L’ABC du Piano Practise very slowly at first, making sure that the fingers press all the way down into the keys for a solid, deep legato. Avoid wrist or finger tension at all costs! Notice the changes in dynamics: First time around to be forte (rather loud) and second time piano (quiet). Hans-Günter Heumann continues his series for beginners in the next issue. To find out more about Heumann, visit www.schott-music.com…

TRACK 3BEGINNER Along with Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók is regarded as Hungary’s greatest composer. He is also considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology. (Little space here to explain the term, but it’s definitely worth the research.) Bartók’s most famous work for solo piano has to be his six-volume, 153-piece set, Mikrokosmos. He wrote three piano concertos – all extremely technically demanding. Being a pianist of virtuoso capabilities, he wrote Nos 1 and 2 for himself to perform and No 3 for his second wife, Ditta, to perform. French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has recorded them all for Chandos. Read Melanie Spanswick’s lesson.…

Grieg’s evocative Lyric Pieces (Lyriske stykker) are loved by amateurs and professionals alike, though one rarely hears them on the concert platform these days. Published in ten volumes, they start out with Op 12 (published 1867) and end with Op 71 (1901). The fourth seven-piece volume, in which ‘Halling’ appears, was written between 1886-8, and published in 1888. The 10-book collection includes several of Grieg’s best known pieces, such as ‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’, ‘To Spring’ (featured a few pages on), ‘March of the Trolls’, and ‘Butterfly’. Grieg favored the theme he used on the very first piece of the set, ‘Arietta’. In fact he used it to complete the set of Lyric Pieces by reworking it as a humorous waltz for the last piece of Op 71. It’s quite…

Chopin composed the set of 19 Polish songs, his Op 74, between 1829 and 1847. They were published after his death. Liszt later transcribed six of the songs between 1856-1860, the second of which – dedicated to Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe – is presented here. Such is the simplistic beauty of Frühling that it is often heard as an encore on the concert platform today. The words of the song feature on the score. Playing tips: The simple, lilting melody sings over a regular accompaniment of arpeggiated quavers. The texture becomes a little more complicated at bar 35, where each hand needs to play quavers while also sustaining longer notes. Where the melody appears in octaves, don’t let your wrist or thumb freeze in position. A light upward movement of…

TRACK 13ADVANCED Mendelssohn’s 48 Songs without Words are hauntingly beautiful, and also very accessible for the intermediate-level pianist; no doubt this has contributed to their ultimate popularity, even if ‘Spring Song’ veers towards the advanced level. The 48 ‘songs’ are grouped into eight volumes (the last two are posthumous) – the Op 62 being the fifth volume. Mendelssohn intended the pieces to remain without lyrics, even though many of his friends tried unsuccessfully to add words to the compositions. Even Liszt was inspired by these pieces, honouring Mendelssohn with his Grosses Konzertstück über Mendelssohns Lieder Ohne Worte (Grand Concert Piece on Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words). The Liszt work is for two pianos, and in true bravura style, Liszt gives Mendelssohn a pianistic workout. Lucy Parham performs ‘Spring Song’ on this…

LEON MCCAWLEY Natural Connection: Piano music inspired by the natural world Somm SOMMCD 0680 Leon McCawley’s latest recital offers pieces inspired by the natural world. He makes some delightful connections in his choices of repertoire. We go straight from a thunderous performance of Liszt’s ‘Orage’ (from the Années de pèlerinage), for example, to a mysteriously unsettling rendition of Bartók’s The Night’s Music: it’s as if Liszt’s storm has exhausted nature itself. A wonderfully unsentimental account of Debussy’s Claire de lune leads into Saint-Saëns’ The Swan (arr. Godowsky): one can imagine the swan gliding along in the very same moonlight. Grieg’s chirpy Little Bird is followed by Ravel’s much more melancholy Oiseaux tristes. Other great nature-lovers such as Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky are well represented, and the recital opens with an uncobwebby…