Note: This page in "blog form," with my oldest recordings and write-ups, dating from 2020, at the bottom, to the most recent at the top. - A. Jones, February 2024.
Wagner/Kocsìs/Liszt, Prelude and Liebestod (*Love death”) from Tristan und Isolde
Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, one of his most celebrated operas (or “music dramas” - the term that he preferred in order to distinguish his own operas from everything in the operatic tradition that had come previously), is likely the most scrutinized ten minutes of music composed during the 19th-century, and composers and music theorists have argued since its premiere in 1865 over the correct technical interpretation of the “Tristan chord” - the dissonant 4-note entity that sounds in the opera’s second measure and reappears throughout the four-hour tale in seemingly endless guises, contexts, and configurations. The most audible feature of the Prelude and of the “music drama” that follow, to audiences in Wagner’s day and today’s listeners as well, is the sense that the music never “resolves” or settles down periodically in the way that most music does here and there. Identifiable patterns and figures recur throughout the drama (Wagner’s terms for them was “Leitmotifs”), allowing the music to be identifiable as music specific to this sprawling piece of music, but the music conveys a sense of restlessness and inability or unwillingness to settle into any periodic or momentary quietude that isn’t haunted or disturbed and that is afforded in most music, from refrains in simple songs to sectional pauses and conventional repetitions in symphonic music. The root cause of this is a simple technical principle - namely, Wagner’s deliberate, painstakingly engineered avoidance of the standard harmonic movement from chords built on the fifth scale degree (known as the “dominant”) to chords built on the first scale degree (the “tonic”) - i.e. the V-I cadence, the most significant harmonic event of most music dating back to the late Renaissance, and of a great deal of popular music in our own era. This avoidance creates the effect of yearning and unfulfilled (or at least deferred) desire - and specifically, within the context of the ill-fated pair, a desire that is obviously sexual. As one scholar succinctly puts it, “The Prelude was conceived as one long succession of linked phrases [. . .] The music’s resounding lack of resolution parallels the longing and agony suffered by Tristan and Isolde over the course of the opera.”
It’s only after four hours of relentless storyline, dialogue, and chromatic harmony that the conventional V-I dominant to tonic cadence arrives during an aria that ends the drama - Isolde’s celebrated Liebestod (“Love death”) - and even that resolution is quirky, as Wagner inserts the subdominant chord between the dominant and the tonic (V-IV-I), as if never the twain shall entirely meet. Early audiences found the Liebestod so intoxicatingly beautiful and intriguing that it soon became a popular concert piece for orchestras to play outside of the operatic context - on a program, say, that might feature a piano concerto by Schumann or Grieg and a Beethoven symphony. Sometimes a soprano would be invited, but sometimes the orchestra would simply play the piece without the vocal line. And quickly it became popular to pair the Prelude with the Liebestod with or without soprano for a spellbinding 16 to 18 minutes of relentless Wagnerian beauty (or ugliness, depending on the taste of the listener). This brief webpage article cites some of the initial reactions, including the gushing opinion of Wagner’s brilliant young confidante Friedrich Nietzsche (whose enthusiasm, of course, eventually did a 180-degree turn into prolific and colorful expressions and analyses of nausea and disgust featured in the philosopher’s two short books on Wagner and elsewhere in his writings), the opinion of revulsion expressed by Clara Schumann, and the humorously heretical reaction on the part of our own Mark Twain, who happened to be in Bayreuth, Germany for the premiere:
https://thelistenersclub.com/2020/06/08/wagners-tristan-und-isolde-prelude-and-liebestod/
We’re fortunate that one of Wagner’s best musical friends and advocates was Franz Liszt, the king of piano transcriptions, who converted the Liebestod into one of his most memorable attempts to convey orchestral music on the piano. It is such a beautifully executed transcription that the performer invariably forgets from time to time, either that the Liebestod wasn’t written by Liszt himself, or that Wagner didn’t in fact score the piece for solo piano.
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Back in the late summer of this year, I set out on the enormous project of learning Liszt’s half-hour, single-movement Sonata in B Minor - one of the most demanding staples of 19th-century piano music. A few weeks of work into learning the notes, I threw out my back and spent the next five weeks recovering from the latest repeat injury to my lower lumbars. I found the Sonata too massive for an injury which temporarily caused limited and painful movement in the twisting and turning and swiveling requisite to that piece, so I started playing around with some other, less daunting items by Liszt - including his famous transcriptions of some of my favorite Schubert songs, and the Liebestod. After a couple of read-throughs of the latter, I decided that I had to learn it thoroughly. I soon began to wonder about the Prelude. Didn’t Liszt transcribe the Prelude? Apparently he didn’t, although his Wagner transcriptions amount to nearly two hours of music. Why he skipped the Prelude is a mystery to me. Perhaps he performed impromptu transcriptions directly from the orchestral score? Who knows.
In any case, I figured that someone else must have transcribed it at one point or another. Sure enough, there have been several attempts. The first couple that I looked at were either very unpianistic and/or seemed intended more as study scores for music theorists and students of harmony than anything that would work well in performance. After a couple of days, however, I stumbled across a real gem - an excellent, Liszt-and-Wagner-worthy piano transcription by the great 20th-century Hungarian pianist Zoltan Kocsìs, who had also recorded it. This piece appears to have fallen out of print, but I was able to find an old pdf online. Apparently it is not well-known, and I’ve only managed to find one or two additional performances on YouTube besides Kocsìs’s own excellent interpretation (it has, however, been featured on at least a few recordings available on Spotify).
Having found Kocsìs’s transcription, I determined to learn the Prelude and Liebestod together. It’s been an extraordinary challenge. The climactic portion of Kocsìs’s Prelude is among the most challenging passages of piano music I’ve ever undertaken. The skillfully arranged tremolos of Liszt’s Liebestod are very tricky and take some time to work out. Above all, the memory work involved in both pieces is unusually daunting, due in part to the unusual figures that both transcribers devise in order to convey orchestral textures on the piano and that necessitate some rather tricky fingering solutions, in part to Wagner’s intricate chromaticism and the constant repetition of Leitmotifs in harmonic situations that vary from phrase to phrase, section to section, with the subtle variations leading to a variety of potential “faulty memory traps.”
It’s taken me the better part of four months, practicing an hour or two after school during the week and up to five or six hours on weekend days and holidays, to memorize this sublime pair and work it up to performance level. But it’s been glorious to bathe for the past several months in just under twenty minutes of some of my favorite orchestral music ever as converted into these two excellent piano transcriptions, and my understanding of how both pieces work at a nuts and bolts level has increased substantially. Like him or not (and - at least since Clara Schumann’s expression of revulsion and Nietzsche’s about face with respect to his former hero and mentor - almost everyone short of Adolf Hitler has conceded that there is much to dislike about Wagner, despite his undeniable transformative genius), Wagner more than anyone else was the watershed moment, the decisive pivot point between “classical” music and “modern” music of all stripes, from the orchestral extravagance of Mahler and the end-point chromaticism of Schoenberg to the more recent music and aesthetics of Bernstein, Coltrane, Zappa, the Who, and beyond.
Kapustin, Jazz Prelude in D minor, Op. 53, No. 24
The final piece in Kapustin’s monumental Jazz Prelude series is, in my opinion, one of Kapustin’s most profound musical statements. It’s over 50% longer than the next longest piece in the series, and of a rather different character than the 23 preludes that precede it. It appears to take its cues from several other memorable end-pieces in the piano literature by serving as an emphatic final statement (especially harmonically, with its strong emphasis of D-minor as the key of the final piece in a prelude series covering all 24 keys in clockwise order within the Circle of 5ths) while hinting at departure - at directions that will ultimately lead outside of the thematic, harmonic, semantic, emotional, etc. environment of the current series. I’m thinking here of Chopin’s “Ocean” etude which rounds out the Op. 25 etudes, Debussy’s “Passepied” as the concluding piece of the Suite Arabesque, the Toccata that ends Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, and especially the epic finale to Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes. Technically, this final prelude is more “through-composed” than the other 23, relying less on repeated thematic material and thus possessing the shifting, surprising character of many pieces in the piano literature loosely given by their respective composers the “fantasie” label.
Appropriately, the piece begins with an upward “flight” of parallel fourths in D Minor - a flight that is punctuated with a chord built on two perfect 4ths (D-G-C). This flight leads to a characteristically jaunty and jazzy melody that modulates to B-flat Major and to a widely contrasting, emotionally laden secondary theme that suggests triumph mixed with regret at what one has had to sacrifice through flight. Thus far the piece, in striking contrast to the forms used previously in the series, appears to be the exposition of a movement in clear sonata-allegro form. But such expectations are subverted when the second third of the piece, occupying spatially what would be a traditional development section, veers off in an entirely different direction thematically, though subtly building both on the “upward flight” motif and on the “stacked-fourth chord” that becomes persistent and ends up leading things away from normative melody-supporting tonality into…for lack of a better term, “Kapustin space-age mode” - a deviation that will become common in many movements as Kapustin progresses through the 1990s and into the 21st-century and as his music flirts more and more with the sketchy borderline between advanced jazz harmony and “free atonality.” This middle section begins with ear-pleasing assonances, somewhat reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel, provided by arpeggiated runs consisting predominantly of perfect 4ths. The arpeggios are interrupted by a jarring staccato conversation between quarter-note unisons and dyads in the bass, into which Kapustin introduces some light chromaticism and segues into a series of phrase-by-phrase and contrasting white-key/black-key flourishes that utilize the “flight” motif; eventually the two textures - scalar runs and chordal structures based on stacked fourths - are combined into a mysterious sort of rocket-launch into the treble half of the piano that finally spills out into the harmonically normative music of the third and final section. But, if the listener was expecting a full recapitulation of the opening music, his or her expectation is thwarted, as what should be the “recap” melody is instead entirely new, though modulating back to a clear D minor for a repetition of the primary thematic material from the beginning of the exposition.
As an aside to indulge my fascination for peculiar “harmonic events” in Kapustin’s music…The 5-tone half-note chord in the left hand, combined with the f-natural/a dyad in the right hand (and also allowing for inclusion of the e-flat later in the measure) creates a spectacular 6-tone cluster that serves an obvious dominant function, particularly as the dominant A is still held in the bass from earlier in the measure, leading back to the D-minor tonic in the next measure - a standard V-I function as pieces return from developmental sections into the thematic and harmonic areas of their home keys. It can be interpreted as a “splash” of four notes from the tonic scale over the dominant chord, anticipating the formal restatement of D minor that follows momentarily, with the “extra” highly dissonant notes of E-flat and C-sharp resolving downwards and upwards respectively to D; as an added note, this cluster also brings two tritones to the delicious cacophony. An apparently random moment of breathless harmonic excitement…but one that is in fact expertly constructed. Sheer genius.
To me the music is saying, through refusing to recap the memorable second-theme “triumph” of the “exposition,” that sometimes we need to move ahead without dwelling explicitly on previous triumphs and on what we may have lost to achieve them. There are points at which there can be no looking back. Repetition of satisfaction can lead to complacency. Or, as Pete Townshend in the late 1970s, “The music must change.” (Fortunately in art, if we long for a reenactment of that moment of triumph, the repetition of which we had to renounce, we can always listen to the piece one more time!)
Or, as I wrote in one of my early poems, “Perhaps it’s time to leave such things behind.”
Emotionally, I believe, this final prelude is one of Kapustin’s most profound pieces of music. I have benefited at both musical and extra-musical levels of reflection from spending the past month sorting out the meanings and numerous technical challenges of this unique gem. Long live Nikolai Kapustin!
Kapustin, Jazz Prelude in B Major, Op.53, No. 11
One of Kapustin’s most gorgeous slow pieces, the influence of the blues elements of early jazz is clearly felt in this piece - beginning with the opening phrase of chromatic dyads, which seem like frogs popping their heads out of the Delta waters at night, and the swampy open B minor chords which follow in the bass. The 12/8 meter is an unusually “commodious” meter for such a slow piece (it takes about 8 seconds to play through a single measure), and, though the piece contains nothing that is technically very difficult to play, it takes many readings for a pianist to work out Kapustin’s slow, meticulously paced swing rhythms and intricate contrapuntal weavings effectively. Though the key signature is B Major, the piece’s melodic essence cuts its path - through several swims out to the dominant E major - in a bluesy parallel minor until the final drawn out affirmation of the official major in the last several measures. The piece ends serenely and sublimely with a pair of descending chromatic whole-tone clusters, the second “resolving” from a suspended A (the minor-7th of B major/minor) in the first. That - the “suspended chromatic whole-tone clusters,” for lack of a better term - shouldn’t work. But God, is it glorious. Sheer genius.
Enjoy.
Kapustin, Jazz Prelude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 53, No. 10.
This feisty little bugger of a jazz prelude rocks. While it’s not one of Kapustin’s most difficult pieces, its bouncy staccato chordal figures make it a challenge to practice for more than half an hour at a time as they lead to a certain amount of dizziness. A standout feature is the prelude’s novel 3/2 time signature. Without knowing the time signature, one would likely gather that the piece is composed in a standard 2/4, nodding to a familiar 4 x 2/4 phrase structure though surprisingly truncated into 3 measures, and this short-circuiting contributing along with the heavy syncopation to the constant rhythmic jarring that is characteristic of the piece. Instead, Kapustin combines 3 conventional measures of 2/4 into a single long measure of 3/2, and the long measure sets up for him a sonic canvas allowing him to play freely with a number of elements, including the chromatic chordal figures loosely inscribed within the relative major that comprise the “B” music.
Kapustin has said that, in addition to the full history of jazz, he was also influenced by rock music of the 1960s and 1970s. This piece is one in which that influence is most palpable, I think.
Kapustin, Jazz Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 53, No. 15.
The fifteenth number in Kapustin’s monumental Jazz Preludes series is among the composer’s most gorgeous and enigmatic shorter works. Like many of Kapustin’s shorter pieces, it adheres to a basic ABA arrangement; it also suggests to the performer a swing rhythm throughout. The heavily syncopated, 12-bar A melody switches back and forth between D-flat (nominally major, but through the added necessary flats, tonally minor throughout) and D major and ends with a partial descent through the circle of 5ths and a surprise glissando over a D-minor-7 chord. (I asked myself, why didn’t Kapustin just notate this piece as the enharmonically equivalent C-sharp minor, as a D-flat minor “spelling” of the normative C-sharp minor is rare and unusual, but then I remembered that he is writing a sequence of 24 preludes, and C-sharp minor has already “had its turn” as another of my favorites and probably next on my list to perform and record - Prelude #10.)
As beautiful and haunting as the A sections are, it’s the B section that I have become addicted to and found so intriguing. There are countless passages in Kapustin’s works in which Kapustin appears to be approximating “free jazz” improv taking place in the middle of a performance of a jazz standard. The harmony in such sections seems to fluctuate precariously between jazz language and free atonality, much like the classic performances of John Coltrane and of jazz musicians influenced by him. On closer inspection, however, it generally becomes apparent that the harmony is in fact closer to jazz than to genuine free atonality ala Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and this particular section alternates as did the A section between measures loosely outlining a heavily chromatic D-flat Major/minor scale and measures outlining a mostly white-key scale, which sometimes looks like C-major/A-minor, sometimes like G-major/E-minor. Halfway through the B section the jazz chords become more prominent and focused as the “atonal” ambiguities fade, connoting a sort of confidence as Kapustin slips back into the return of the haunting A-theme.
The B section is very difficult to memorize due to the rarefied harmonic world it inhabits, but once you’ve got that down this piece is very fun to play - a sheer joy. I repeat, the last European composer to write piano music this consistently clear and beautiful while simultaneously complex and thought-provoking and in such abundance was Ravel, and what is even more wonderful is that Kapustin’s solo piano works offer the eager 21st-century pianist probably four times as much music to choose from as the comparatively small bundle from Ravel. Long live Kapustin!
Kapustin, Jazz Prelude in G-sharp Minor (Op. 53, No. 12)
I’m very excited to announce the inaugural video played on my new digital piano - the Roland LX706! It’s the same Kapustin Jazz Prelude (Op. 53, No. 12 in G-sharp Minor) that I posted two weekends ago, but recorded on a far mightier instrument that my Roland FP30, which got me through my botched acoustic Yamaha piano tuning debacle of mid-2020 when piano tuners were not making housecalls.
The Roland LX700 series has made significant strides forward in providing classical pianists with an experience that comes very close to playing on the best acoustic pianos. There are four grand piano tones to choose from (two European, two American), in addition to at least half a dozen additional acoustic piano tones (uprights tuned to approximate the ragtime and honky tonk pianos of old, among them), a dozen electric piano tones (including the popular “1976 Suitcase” model and a Ray Manzarek-esque ‘60s electric), a dozen organ tones, and several early keyboard tones - harpsichords, a clavichord, and a Beethoven-era fortepiano. The piano can also serve as a Bluetooth stereo, and I’ve been listening profitably to heaps of Jeff Beck and CSNY in honor of the passing of two great contemporary musicians.
In case anyone’s wondering about cost…A new LX706 runs about $6000 (it’s top-line sibling, the LX708, costs about $8500, has 8 speakers rather than 6, and utilizes “haptic” technology which simulates for the player the vibrations of an acoustic…someday…). I purchased it at Piano Planet pre-owned for $3000, and they threw in the very nice piano bench as a bonus.
Kapustin's Jazz Preludes Op. 53, written in the 1980s, are clearly modeled on Chopin's Preludes, particularly in that they take us through all 24 major and minor keys. I hope to play around ten of them. This fiery specimen has a simple ABA structure, with the B music reverting to a major-key swing rhythm that represents a light-hearted counterpart to the angry lines of the A music.
Liszt, “Paysage” (Transcendental Etude #3), 1820s-1830s.
“Paysage” - French variously for “scenery,” “landscape,” and “countryside” (at least) - for many years has been my favorite piece by Liszt in any genre. It’s somewhat out of place amongst his twelve Transcendental Etudes, most of the rest of which are of very high technical difficulty. Liszt is said to have conceived the piece while watching the changing scenery during a train ride.
The genius of this piece resides in its radical and thorough use of syncopation - unusual in itself for a piece that is played in a moderately slow tempo. The official time signature is 6/8, which the main melody that is introduced by the right-hand octaves generally follows. However, the left-hand ostinato with which the piece begins, which gradually takes on the character of a descending countermelody, sounds as if it were written in 2/4. This disparity between the official meter and the unofficial syncopating meter carries throughout the piece and, coupled with some key harmonic features, leads to a sense of restlessness and mild agitation that pervades what, without the programmatic indication of the title, might strike the listener as a classic lullaby, though without the generally thoroughly going placidity characteristic of, say, the familiar lullaby of Brahms.
The harmonic subtleties just mentioned include: a) a “fake” move to the relative minor early on in the piece, signaled by the ominous A major chord (the modulation to minor never comes, and the harmony is firmly major throughout), b) the jarring E-flat/G-flat dyad a bit less than a minute into the piece, heralding an altogether new, ambiguous, and perhaps dangerous situation, and c) the repeated flatted 7th (E-flat) following the climax (in a downward, 2/4 descent of the octaves that momentarily and triumphantly suspends the official 6/8), suggesting, with its hint of mixolydian modality, that a resolution of the piece's antinomies has taken place in an altogether new space that the piece has forged on its very own.
For me, “Paysage” is one of the most beautiful and perfect pieces ever written for the piano and should be as familiar to general listeners as, say, the same composer’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2, Debussy’s Clair de lune or his 1st Arabesque, the middle movement of Beethoven’s “Pathetique Sonata” and the first movement of his “Moonlight Sonata,” particular preludes by Bach and Rachmaninoff, Mozart’s “Turkish March,” and any number of pieces by Chopin that can often be identified by people who seldom listen to European piano music. May this humble recording contribute to the piece’s rise in the “identifiability ranks”!
Nikolai Kapustin, “Prelude,” from 8 Concert Studies, Op. 40 (the first of eight pieces)
I’ve only recently become aware of the late great Ukrainian composer Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020). The first piece I heard was the “Toccatina” from this same set of “concert studies” composed (or at least first published) in the 1980s; in recent years it has become a popular encore among professional pianists, frequently performed by Yuja Wang and others. (Kapustin wrote two pieces bearing the name “Toccatina”; the other Toccatina has its own opus number (Op. 36) and is also performed fairly frequently.)
Like most of Kapustin’s music, the eight pieces that comprise Op. 40 reflect an instantly notable jazz idiom. As a young man, Kapustin fronted a Ukrainian jazz band as he was undergoing his conservatory training in Moscow and beginning to write music within the framework of European “classical” composition. Jazz rhythm and harmony are the most obvious elements of Kapustin’s musical language beginning with his earliest compositions in the 1960s and 1970s. The composer insisted in at least one interview, however, that his music is not jazz per se as it contains no improvisational element and, like most products of the European tradition, is meant to be performed verbatim note for note. He also emphasized that his work as a jazz pianist was essential to the development of his compositional language.
Music for solo piano comprises at least half of Kapustin’s sizeable oeuvre; in addition to 20 piano sonatas, his works for the piano include a set of 24 preludes and another set of 24 preludes and fugues (clearly if loosely modeled on canonical works by Chopin and Bach respectively), numerous études, a Baroque-style suite, sets of variations and bagatelles, and numerous short single-movement pieces with programmatic titles like “Sunrise,” “Big Band Sounds,” and “The Moon Rainbow.” He also composed six piano concertos and numerous orchestral and chamber works. Almost all of his music is constructed through jazz harmony, although there appears to be a tendency in Kapustin’s later works to play with the borderline between advanced jazz harmony at its fringes and musical language that would probably be better characterized as atonal (or very nearly atonal, as in many nominally tonal early 20th-century pieces by Prokofiev and Bartok).
The 8 Concert Studies that this “Prelude” introduces is one of Kapustin’s most popular works and has been recorded by a number of pianists. I have spent the past two months listening to Kapustin almost exclusively, and these pieces are also among my favorites. I am still getting to know Kapustin’s music in its breathtaking diversity from start to finish of his long career, but my current impression is that he is overall the strongest composer of “classical” piano music since the generation born in the 1860s through 1880s that includes Debussy, Ravel, Ives, Bartok, and Scriabin. While jazz harmony and rhythm are the most prominent elements that strike the listener on initial acquaintance, prolonged exploration of Kapustin’s music turns up a range of detectable influence from Bach and Beethoven to Chopin and Brahms to Debussy and Prokofiev to McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett. The technical and generic range that Kapustin develops as he draws from his musical ancestors is vast, subtle, and impressive, and his range of expression, emotion, affect, etc. fully commensurate with the former. Combing backwards chronologically through the array of renowned musicians working within the European tradition, I would have to go back perhaps as far as Ravel to find a composer whose music commands an expressive and affective range that is of as broad potential appeal to musicians and non-musicians alike as Kapustin’s. In short, I’m happy to have joined the fast growing cult around this great composer whose quiet life, steady production, and combination of mathematical precision and generic erudition with the utmost musical passion and nuance is reminiscent of J. S. Bach, with whom he is often compared.
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This 70-measure “Prelude” features several brief, lively, and heavily syncopated motivic units that are repeated at the beginning, middle, and end of the piece, along with two “in between” sections of six and sixteen measures respectively that showcase brisk, beautiful, and heavily chromatic 16th-note melodies in the right hand. Harmonically, the effervescent and cheery C major announced in the opening rising-octaves-and-falling-chords motif pairing is muted somewhat by recurring moves counterclockwise through the circle of 5ths into the several most closely related flatted keys, which suggest a sort of dampening or qualifying of the initial high spirits with a healthy dose of realism, sobriety, worldly experience, etc., though the last measures are obviously triumphant.
The piece is absolutely gorgeous, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the past month of working on it almost exclusively for 2-3 hours per day. It’s not a particularly difficult piece of music technically (and much of Kapustin’s piano music, while always pianistically idiomatic, is very, very difficult), but the advanced jazz harmony has represented a substantial learning curve when it comes to memorization; the challenge of committing the piece to memory has been similar to that of an average Bach fugue…and Bach fugues are never easy to memorize.
I look forward to playing at least 6 of the 7 remaining pieces in this set, as well as a number of preludes, etudes, and other pieces, in the forthcoming months. Long live the great Nikolai Kapustin!
Chopin, Etude Op. 25, No. 11 (“Winter Wind”)
Chopin’s so-called “Winter Wind” etude is often viewed as the mother of all piano etudes - Chopin’s longest (in terms of note-count) of his 27 etudes, and arguably the hardest and most demanding. The etude is constructed on a simple, march-like theme played by the left hand and a series of descending runs in the right hand.
Etudes are supposed to be studies of particular technical challenges. “Winter Wind” vies with several representative other Chopin etudes for distinction as the composer’s most difficult; these other etudes are a bit more obvious in featured technical demand: Op. 10, No. 1, for instance, is a study in rapid right-hand arpeggios with enormous leaps; Op. 10, No. 2, in rapid chromatic runs in the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of the right hand, and Op. 25, No. 6, in runs filled with dyadic thirds played in rapid succession. In contrast, there is no specific challenge of “Winter Wind” that serves an obvious pedagogical focus to the exclusion of other challenges within the piece; rather, it edges out all of Chopin’s other etudes in the difficulty rankings (for me, at least) through: a) its sheer length and relative lack of note-for-note repetition; b) the composer’s demand that it be played at a very fast tempo (his tempo marking reads a half-note = 69, although nobody actually plays it that fast, and, if they did, they’d be delivering about 900 pieces of acoustic information per minute); and, c) the mental concentration and physical stamina it takes to “keep it all together” for the several minutes of pianistic attention that the piece occupies.
By far the most captivating aspect of “Winter Wind” is the right-hand descending figure, which appears eight times in two different keys (A minor and E minor), with 2-3 transpositions in each key. Chopin must have experienced a great deal of delight when he happened upon this ingenious figure, which consists of a chromatic scale played by the 3rd, 4th and 5th fingers alternating with an arpeggio played by the thumb and 2nd finger. Between each of the downward cascades lie 4-6 measures of ascending and descending arpeggios that are not exactly easy but that are typical of the arpeggiated figures that fill Chopin’s repertoire (a middle section devoted to thematic development also consists of these more standard arpeggiated flourishes). But each pianist has to figure out on his or her own how to unlock the spidery puzzle that the piece’s signature downward cascade as described above presents - how to finger each of its eight manifestations and how to group the notes together during practice so as to emphasize implied melodies that are embedded within the cascades and so as to eventually, through hours and hours of practice, achieve evenness and velocity.
Although I have “played around” with “Winter Wind” sporadically for decades, I only got serious about mastering it sometime early in the spring of this year. It took me an estimated 80-90 hours of work to be able to play it very slowly from memory. Since then, it’s taken me about the same amount of time to bring it up to a speed that is roughly adequate (though still rather slower than most recordings by professionals). It’s a wonderful piece to have “acquired,” as, aside from the issue of how well I can actually play it, it will serve henceforth as a great set of “warm-up tools,” particularly for maintaining and furthering right-hand and right-arm strength and dexterity.
I have put so much effort into this piece that, when I was finished recording it, I was tempted to turn to the camera, grin childishly, and mutter, “Winter Wind, muthaf***ahs!” though thought the better of it, knowing that Frédéric would disapprove. Nevertheless…
“Winter Wind, muthaf***ahs!”
(As a sidenote…Chopin strongly disapproved of nicknames for his etudes, and “Winter Wind” was not his idea. My goal was to post a recording this past Sunday to honor my father Walter Jones on Father’s Day, figuring that this piece could just as well have been nicknamed “Summer Hail.” Indeed, I hear it more as a pianistic approximation of a thunderstorm. An even better analogy is an extra long, impossibly satisfying roller coaster ride, with each of the eight “cascades” representing the characteristic drops of such rides.)
-- Recorded June 2022
Schumann, Toccata in C, Op. 7
Schumann’s Toccata is somewhat infamous among pianists. Upon completion of the work in his mid-20s, Schumann boasted that it was the most difficult piece of music ever written for the piano. A large number of pianists from the 1830s until today have agreed with him. Henle, the prominent publisher of piano music, lists it as the exemplary work for “9” - their highest level of difficulty.
Surely, one asks, there must have been works written for the piano since Schumann’s time that surpass the Toccata in difficulty? At roughly the same time, Chopin and Liszt were composing their famous books of etudes, most of which, as studies, were purposefully difficult. The next generation saw the virtuosic early works of Brahms. Then fast-forward over the better part of the 19th-century to the demanding masterpieces for solo piano of modern composers such as Ravel, Ives, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Barber, with their increasingly dense and post-traditional musical language.
Pianistic difficulty, like most categories of difficulty, is of course relative, subjective, in the eyes of the beholder, etc. On the one hand, no one would doubt the claim that the Goldberg Variations and “Hammerklavier” Sonata, as the longest and most challenging keyboard works by Bach and Beethoven respectively (each of them requiring more than half an hour to perform in their entirety), place greater demands overall on the pianist than this single-movement piece that is generally performed in under ten minutes. On the other hand, the complexities of harmony, rhythm, and texture that characterize Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit or Ives’s Concord Sonata add challenges of processing and cognition that transcend the muscular and tactile challenges of music employing a generally conventional tonal language.
What is it about Schumann’s piece that allows it to retain its status with as high authority as Henle as the prototype or paradigm of piano music at its most challenging?
The answer is obvious to pianists…but even then maybe only to pianists who have put at least a couple hours of serious work into the Toccata. The answer, specifically, is the first 25 measures of this 283-measure piece. Few pianists who have actually performed the Toccata seem willing to argue that there exist solo piano pieces with openings quite this technically daunting. The few who do argue this are those pianists - usually men - endowed with fingers an inch longer than the average person’s…fingers such as those of Horowitz, Pogorelich, and Cziffra - top-tier pianists whose recordings of the Toccata are among the most celebrated. Perhaps such fortunately endowed pianists find the Toccata less formidable than, say, the descending onslaught of arpeggiated figures of Chopin’s “Winter Wind” etude, the bitonal left and right-hand cascades of Ravel’s “Ondine,” or the finger-tying, trill-laden rhythmic beehives in the sonatas of Scriabin that are the bane of all math-challenged pianists.
The odd thing about this 25-measure opening, which is heard three times (a second in the repetition of the exposition and a third verbatim in the recapitulation) is that it doesn’t SOUND particularly hard, at least in comparison to the examples quoted above or to passages in other celebrated pieces featuring lots of flashy scalar and arpeggiated flourishes that have the pianist scurrying up and down the keyboard at lightning speed. To name it, the specific challenge of these measures could be characterized as “dyadic intervals, some of them quite wide, played in rapid succession by different pairs of fingers on the same hand.” Breaking that down further: The right and left hands both face daunting tasks of wide, 16th-note intervals played by the pinky and thumb that alternate, in the left hand, with unisons played with the second finger and, in the right hand, by smaller intervals played mostly by the second and fourth fingers. The intervals played by the outer fingers of each hand range from minor 6ths to major 9ths in the right hand and from octaves to major and minor 10ths in the left hand. The composer’s vague expectation, indicated by intentionally sparse text markings, is that these intervallic alternations, challenging in themselves, be played Allegro - that is, fast, at least to some degree.
Hands were not built to execute such tasks. An exceptional amount of time must be taken to learn to play this passage well, and a corresponding amount of care must be taken to avoid injury. In fact, many have speculated that it was Schumann’s own attempt to master the Toccata that led to the injuries that shut down his prospective career as a pianist.
The other 90% of the piece consists of equally interesting and quirky “set pieces” that are generally characterized by some unique pattern or texture and that would have struck Schumann’s contemporaries as novel in some way - possibly jarring and unnerving, possibly comic and delightful - the unique sorts of patterns and textures that Schumann was churning out in great abundance as he was sketching the series of compositions that would comprise his great contribution to solo piano literature: Carnival, the Symphonic Etudes, Kreisleriana, Fantasy in C, Humoreske, etc. Some of these “set pieces” are quite tricky in themselves and take some time to master. The three-page coda is ALMOST as challenging as the opening, as it returns to the wide intervals with which the piece begins, though thankfully this time around they appear as arpeggiated leaps rather than as a succession of hand-breaking dyads. The pianist’s intense focus on the challenges that each set piece presents is alleviated briefly by the comparatively easy and tuneful secondary theme (which likely serves as “popout” in the memory of listeners new to this piece) and by the wonderful rapid octave melody in the development, which is in itself a great showpiece but which is easier to play than most of the rest of the Toccata.
Each pianist must come up with his or her own plan for rendering the impossible opening possible. Hand-size certainly contributes to individual approaches. My hands are probably exactly average in size. There are no intervals in the piece that I cannot play, but I struggle along with everyone else to figure out how to play the intervals at my chosen tempo (a rather slower-than-average 69-76 beats per minute, depending on where I am in the “developing rubato” that gets me through the 25 measures in one piece) without stiffening up and breaking down towards the end of the 25-measure segment. For me the solution lies in a very light and supple touch and a dynamic that averages mezzopiano, only crescendoing here and there to a mezzoforte and to a surprise fortissimo (if everything goes well and if my right forearm is up for it) in the first ascension of the chords towards the end of the intro, backing off to a piano and slowing down a bit on the second ascension with which the passage concludes.
BUT…Playing the opening by itself is one thing, and retaining one’s stamina through three reiterations of this intervallic monstrosity while leaving enough energy for the very challenging coda in the final three pages is another! That, apparently, is why the piece is seldom performed live by professional pianists, who probably figure, “Well, it’s either the Toccata or the rest of the program…”
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I’ve been mesmerized by this piece since my teen years when Ivo Pogorelich’s famous rendition appeared on one of the albums that established him as the pianistic enfant terrible of our generation, and long before I was aware of its particular reputation for difficulty. I was actually rather indifferent to the piece early on, much as I marveled at the young Romanian’s extremely brisk staccato attack with minimal use of sustaining pedal (something I could never manage with my average hands, average fingers, and average patience for achieving technical perfection). It was the last third of the piece with the harmonic subtleties Schumann gradually introduces that increasingly intrigued me and drew me in. I thought I was listening to a different piece of music in every new recording I encountered. Maybe five years ago I started picking away at it - more out of curiosity and eagerness to analyze what it was about the textures and harmonies that I found so intriguing. At first I thought, Jesus, I’ll never be able to play the opening, even if the rest of the piece seems vaguely within my grasp. Eventually I got so sucked in by my fascination with the latter half of the piece that I decided I’d do my best to conquer those damned alternating intervals of measures 1-25, even if I’d never be able to play them particularly well or up to speed.
I’ve spent more time practicing those 25 measures than anything else I’ve ever worked on at the piano. At one point it dawned on me that my hand and arm strength had increased considerably due to constant practice and the ever-shifting approaches I developed to “taming” the damn thing so that I was more or less in control of it rather than more or less at its mercies. Indeed, I’ve spent so much time on the opening that I now regard it as the easiest portion of the Toccata for me to play and find myself spending most of my practice time dealing with the ins and outs of the dozen other tricky “set pieces” that comprise this unique piece of piano music!
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Schumann himself apparently was fascinated by his own creation. It is reported that he played it to himself frequently. It is also reported that he grew disgusted with the manner in which it was immediately treated as a showpiece for virtuosos, that he disapproved of the tempos at which pianists without permission hauled it out of an Allegro and into a Presto range, and that he himself played it much slower and more quietly than everyone else.
It is when I read these anecdotes a number of years ago and then listened to dozens of recordings that it dawned on me that pianists by and large have gotten the Toccata wrong. Schumann’s markings, as mentioned above, are minimal, and the most striking of them is a note he left on the first page explaining his minimal markings as in keeping with his desire to allow the pianist the greatest interpretive latitude. I wish that he had further specified his Allegro with a “ma non troppo” or a “moderato,” because the simple fact is that everyone takes this piece much too fast.
A very well-written scholarly article argues this point, which has not been lost on a certain percentage of Schumann listeners, if not necessarily pianists themselves. A certain fascinating harmonic unfolding takes place in the latter half of the piece which becomes less striking the faster and faster you play it. That “unfolding” has to do in large part with three or four repeatedly flatted notes emphasizing this or that aspect of the tonic key of C or several other related keys important to the work, including the dominant (G) to which the Toccata modulates for the tuneful and hummable secondary theme and the relative minor (A) with which the development begins. To listeners who are paying attention to Schumann’s novel use of “first movement Sonata Allegro form” and his obvious debts to Beethoven, and who are equally mindful of Schumann’s designation of this piece as a “toccata” - a common title used by Baroque composers to characterize a range of freely structured solo keyboard pieces…well, the beauties and subtleties of one of Schumann’s finest compositions get lost when the piece is viewed exclusively as a virtuosic showpiece and played at a tempo in which the nuances, subtleties, ironies, etc. of harmony and structure become inaudible.
My level of virtuosity is low, and I can’t possibly play the Toccata at the speed of the aforementioned pianists. Nor would I want to if I could! I hope that somebody out there enjoys my recording and thus picks up some of the great enjoyment I have derived from studying this great, unique, and misunderstood piece of piano music!
I may try to write a verse analysis of the Toccata in which I speculate on some of the meanings that I hear Schumann conveying. Briefly, I think that the piece has something to do with the need to acknowledge and reckon with old ways of doing things (and the need on the part of others - Lacan’s “Big Other” - for individuals, especially youths, to acknowledge and express their respect for such old ways), but at the same time the need to make one’s claim within and against tradition - even if and when such a wrangling leads to comic embarrassments - and to suggest that only by challenging and pushing against the limits which tradition has set for us do we find tradition acknowledging the pain it feels in being asked to bend, we in turn acknowledging that pain and acknowledging that the pain is necessary and that we share in it, even if it implies or at least risks an eventual abandonment, full or partial.
That’s a bit of what the Toccata means to me!
-- Recorded April 2022
J. S. Bach, Fantasy in A Minor, BWV 922.
This haunting piece of music comprises seven or eight of the oddest minutes of music that Bach ever wrote. It is little known and rarely performed. I discovered it half a year ago while foraging through the dozens of miscellaneous keyboard pieces by Bach that have been neglected for centuries for the ostensible reason that they were never included in major noteworthy collections such as the three sets of keyboard suites, the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the Notebook of Anna Magdelena Bach.
While harpsichordists have apparently known about BWV 922 for some time, only a handful of pianists have recorded it, and the memorable recording by the great German pianist Alfred Brendel is the only interpretation from a world famous pianist. Not even Glenn Gould, the most influential Bach interpreter of the past century, seems to have been aware of it.
Its relative obscurity may also have to do with the fact that at one time its authenticity as a work by J. S. Bach appears to have been questioned, although from what I can gather it has been removed from Bach’s rather extensive “dubious works” list for some time now. I believe that it has never been published in a critical edition, and the two copies I have are exactly the same as pdf versions in the public domain that you can obtain through an Internet search.
The Fantasy was written when Bach was quite young - early to mid-20s. At least one critic has identified it as a high point among Bach’s early compositions. Some sources apparently also refer to it as “Prelude and Fugue in A Minor,” and that description is apt, as the opening couple of minutes can be heard as an introduction to the somewhat longer and weightier fugue, although there is a third, shorter section that follows the fugue and concludes the piece. The prelude and this concluding section are both very odd in that they each consist of a series of fragments that seem oddly unrelated motivically. Several commentators have suggested that Bach’s obvious goal in this piece is to jar, unnerve, and surprise the listener.
By far the oddest element of the Fantasy, however, is the relentless fugue, which features a fugue subject that is so short (five notes only) that I was actually surprised, after my first listen, to learn that this portion of the piece is indeed considered a fugue rather than some weird, primarily chordal entity constructed from constant successive entries of the persistent five-note figure, which creates a somewhat vertiginous sense of simultaneous ascent and descent through the “upward” flight of the arpeggiated first three notes and the chromatic step down taken by the fifth note in each of the dozens of reiterations.
Perhaps the single biggest shock in the piece comes with the weird tritone leap from from an E major seventh chord to a B-flat major chord in the final section. The E major seventh chord pertains to this weird, Harpo Marx-like arpeggiated flourish that comes after the initial, rather plaintively menacing chordal section following the fugue. Then you get the jarring tritone leap to this completely differently textured slow part with trills that sounds oddly like a 19th- or early 20th-century piece evoking a Spanish bullfight. When I first heard this, I thought to myself, “Oh my god...what an ugly chord...that must have been a tritone leap,” and quickly found a pdf online to confirm this. The tritone, for those of you who are not up on music theory, is the interval of an augmented 4th or diminished 5th - the most dissonant interval and involving two pitches that harmonically/acoustically are set at the furthest distance from each other in nature. In the Middle Ages the tritone was commonly called the “devil’s interval,” avoided whenever possible...and it still would have had this reputation in the mid-to-late Baroque when Bach composed the Fantasy.
I absolutely love this unusual, almost nightmarish piece, which I simply call 922 - like some freakish country road with twists and turns - potholes galore, narrow lanes, and zero shoulder - through forbidding, swampish woods that are redolent of some sort of natural or spiritual decay as if haunted by the spirit of Washington Irving (or, more appropriately, by a sprite out of Goethe’s Faust). There’s no other piece of music quite like it, and, despite the misgivings of previous generations of Bach scholars, I’m convinced that it could only have been written by Bach, because it is too ingeniously intricate and emotionally effective to have been written by any of Bach’s contemporaries. After watching a Bourdain episode featuring the history of absinthe at roughly the same time as I acquainted myself with this piece, I mused that 922 was the probable result of some merry prankster - perhaps one of Bach’s appreciative choristers - slipping absinthe into the young master’s doppelbock at a favorite Weimar watering hole one evening in the late autumn of 1709.
I hope somebody enjoys it. Nice to have recorded it as we’re coming into spooky October in this already disturbing Year of Our Coronavirus and American election year.
-- Recorded September 2020
Ravel - “Forlane,” from Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917)
“Forlane” for me is simply one of the coolest piano pieces ever. And I mean “cool” in all the dimensions that the word conjures up. Particularly it is “cool” in being several decades ahead of its time harmonically and, with its chords and chord clusters utilizing 7ths and 9ths, anticipating jazz harmonies of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, many of the great jazz pianists who were also trained in classical piano were influenced by Ravel, including names like Bill Evans and the recently deceased McCoy Tyner, and the pianists ended up influencing composers and bandleaders they worked with such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
The coolness that resonated with the great jazz pianists after WWII was born of the tragedies of WWI, and each of the six pieces that comprise Le Tombeau de Couperin was dedicated to one of six friends that Ravel had lost in the war.
Thanks again to Stacy Ettinger, who suggested that I play some Ravel. At first I told her, “You’ll have to give me a couple of years on that one, as Ravel is one of the most challenging composers for the piano.” Fortunately my two favorite piano pieces by Ravel, in fact - this piece and the Pavane that I recorded a couple of months ago - are considerably less demanding technically than his hardest pieces. So I owe it to Stacy that I now have my two favorite Ravel pieces in my repertoire.
A forlane or furlana is an Italian dance form of the baroque period; both Couperin and Bach wrote pieces that they entitled furlana. The six pieces that make up Le Tombeau de Couperin are based on various musical forms derived from the baroque, and the peculiar richness of “Forlane” and the other pieces within the set, with its general overall tone of light melancholy and sanguine resignation, derives largely from the unique combination of antique form coupled with pioneering musical language.
-- Recorded July 2020
Alban Berg, Piano Sonata, Op. 1.
Berg’s first and only piano sonata, written as a single movement of 12-13 minutes in duration, is one of the cornerstones of 20th-century piano literature. It has been perhaps my favorite piano piece written after 1900 since I fell in love with it as a teenager during my freshman year of college 37 years ago. I have picked away at it for decades and have always wanted to carve out a good month of spare time in order to learn it completely. It is a dream at long last fulfilled to have had the opportunity to devote the last 39 days to it almost exclusively.
The piano sonata was Berg’s first published composition. He completed it at the age of 23, and it represented the culmination of his student work under fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg. It is nominally in B minor - the key from which it departs in the first few measures and to which it memorably returns in the last few. But the tonality is so “stretched out” that, like many of Schoenberg’s early works, there are dozens of measures that can no longer be entirely justified in terms of the traditional harmonic framework from which Schoenberg and his students were seeking a departure in the first decade of the 20th-century. The dramatic return to the tonal center of the home key on the last couple of pages, and the subdued final confirmation of B minor which follows, is, for me, one of the most beautiful and profound moments in all of modern music.
The sonata presents a moderate degree of technical challenge, and the numerous 3-against-4 passages are tricky to work out metrically at first. Due to the piece’s harmonic complexity and the general density of the musical language, however, it presents a serious challenge to any pianist who hopes to internalize it at a deeper level through memorization. I have never spent so much time at work memorizing a single piece of music, and I can foresee it will be a significant challenge to retain it in memory as I move on to other pieces.
I am grateful to COVID-19 for having afforded me the opportunity to make this gorgeous and revolutionary piece of piano music my life for the last number of weeks. The sonata has also given its life to me, and I have been living under its aspect since late May, sensing the resonance of its turbulence with the turbulence that our country is currently experiencing through COVID-19 and since the murder of George Floyd.
-- Recorded July 2020
Ravel, “Pavane pour une infante defunte.”
My third piano video is dedicated to the Radford Class of 2020, including Facebook friends Hannah Elizabeth and Raymond Beisner. “Pavane pour une infante defunte” translates more or less to “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” But, despite the profound serenity of the piece, Ravel stated that the title was in jest (“infante defunte” is a comic sound combination in French), in keeping perhaps with an emergent Dada sensibility in the fin-de-siecle Paris of his early adulthood (this was Ravel’s first major piece of music, which the late bloomer completed only in his mid-20s). The effect in English would be similar if he had entitled it, “Pavane for a Bride Who Died in High Tide.”
I don’t think Ravel would mind at all if we rechristened his title, “Pavane for a Prematurely Terminated School Year.” Ravel’s Pavane is one of those melancholic, pensive major-key pieces that spends the bulk of its time lingering on the minor chords and scalar resonances embedded within the parent key. For me the triumphant chords on which the piece ends comfort us with the following sentiment:
“Yes, we were cheated out of a school year. We were cheated out of spring sports seasons, proms, traditional graduation ceremonies, and face-to-face goodbyes with our teachers, peers, and cherished friends. But in our losses we will find our strengths, and we will emerge from the ruins of our compromised and curtailed senior year with the premonition of triumph and great things to come in the short- and long-term future!”
A special mahalo to my dear friend Stacy Ettinger (Stacy Ettinger...you have two FB accounts...one for you and one for your Doppelganger??), who three weeks ago requested that I play some Ravel. Stacy, I owe you a big favor, because I REALLY NEEDED Ravel and the Pavane in my life this past month, and I wouldn’t have known this without your request! More Ravel to follow in the next couple of weeks.
If someone asked me to compile a list of the world’s 100 most beautiful melodies that would include everything from Bach and Beethoven through Beck and Wu Bai, the Pavane would be close to the top of that list. Ravel went on from this, his first great piece of music, to compose some of the 20th-century’s greatest musical masterpieces, but in my opinion he never topped this first great piece.
-- Recorded May 2020
My second piano video. Debussy’s “Passepied.”
“Passepied,” the last of four movements from the Suite Bergamasque (and the piece that fittingly follows ”Clair de Lune”), has been one of my 5-6 favorite Debussy pieces since I was a teenager, although I didn’t play it until I was around 30. When I first fell in love with the piece, I knew from my music studies that a passepied was a Baroque dance form utilized for instrumental pieces by Bach and others and that Debussy was thus paying homage to a bygone era. However, I imagined a passepied to be like a French centipede, as in the arcade game popular in the 1970s and 1980s, and the tricky and slithery left-hand figure that the piece starts with to be its embodiment.
-- Recorded April 2020
My YouTube piano debut! Scriabin's Left-hand Nocturne (Op. 9, No. 2).
This first one goes out to childhood friend, Glenn Saylor, who has been bugging me to put something on YouTube for quite some time! Glenn lived next to my piano teacher and used to listen in on my lessons. For you, buddy! Close your eyes and imagine it's 1975 on Yost Avenue!
This nocturne is Scriabin's key contribution to that small sub-genre in the piano repertoire - namely, pieces written for left-hand solo, the most famous by far of which is Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. Scriabin's piece demands unusual attention because it has the left hand doing the work of two hands and playing in the upper register where it doesn't usually hang out much. It's not the hardest thing to play in the world, but it is certainly very hard to play without making any mistakes owing to fatigue in maintaining one's concentration on all of the unusual leaps and bounds.
This piece by the young Scriabin is underperformed. I think it's one of the most gorgeous pieces of music written in the last quarter of the 19th-century. Enjoy!
-- Recorded April 2020