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GG: Charles Rosen on Playing the Piano
There's a article of interest by the always interesting Mr. Rosen up on
the NY Review of Books website.
This is the URL I came up with:
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19991021049F
Sample paragraphs from early on:
This variety is the reason that almost all books on how
to play the piano are absurd, and that any dogmatic
system of teaching technique is pernicious. (Most
pianists, in fact, have to work to some extent in late
adolescence to undo the effects of their early instruction
and find an idiosyncratic method which suits them
personally.) Not only the individual shape of the hand
counts but even the shape of the entire body. That is
why there is no optimum position for sitting at the
piano, in spite of what many pedagogues think. Glenn
Gould sat close to the floor, while Artur Rubinstein was
almost standing up. It may seem paradoxical that some
pianists spend more time choosing a chair for a concert
than an instrument; the piano technician at the Festival
Hall in London told me that the late Shura Cherkassky
decided on the piano he wanted in five minutes, but
spent twenty minutes trying out different stools.
The height at which one sits does affect the style of
performance. It is difficult, for example, when one is
sitting very low, to play bursts of virtuoso octaves
fortissimo, as with the following famous passage of the
Tchaikovsky concerto in B-flat minor:
Figure1
That is one aspect of piano technique that Glenn Gould,
for example, could not deal with. (A recording engineer
at CBS Records told me that when Gould recorded
Liszt's arrangement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5,
he first recorded some of the virtuoso octaves in the
right hand by using both hands and overdubbed the left
hand afterward.) Nevertheless, the low seated position
enabled Gould to achieve a beautiful technical control
of rapid passage-work with different kinds of touch.
The way one sits at the keyboard has had an influence
on the music that composers write as well as on
performance. Ravel also sat very low, for instance, and
in his music there are no examples of parallel octaves
fortissimo in unison for both hands which are the
trademark of so much nineteenth-century virtuosity,
particularly the school of Liszt, and which account for
the main excitement in the concertos of Tchaikovsky
and Rachmaninoff. This Lisztian style of octaves
demands a play of the back and shoulder muscles more
difficult to manage from a low position. Ravel's Scarbo,
perhaps the greatest tone poem for piano in the Liszt
tradition, contains no parallel octaves of this kind, but
only octaves alternating between the hands, equally
difficult to play but not requiring a raised position of the
arms.
- References:
- GG:
- From: Theresa Chen <elisha-jt@juno.com>