Alfred Brendel on music

This is actually the title of a collection of essays by Alfred Brendel, combining most of two earlier essay collections Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (1976) and Music Sounded Out (1991). The combined collection was published last year, and includes extensive revision of a few articles. For those who are interested, the publisher is Chicago Review Press, and the ISB number is 1 55652-408-0

As you probably already surmised from my earlier posts I am primarily exploring the two composers who straddled the Classic and Romantic periods, namely Beethoven and Schubert. This book is tremendous! Brendel’s views about these two composers are illuminating. Even if you don’t play the music yourself, these essays help you to at least listen with better ears.

Brendel really has something to say. Even if some of his views can be rather controversial, at least he has formed them from a position of deep scholarship and as one of the foremost interpreters of piano music by Beethoven and Schubert.

I’ll probably add new posts as I work my way through the essays.

DVDs are a god-send!

The age of relatively inexpensive digital video in the form of the DVD is surely a god-send to classical music buffs. Many old performances captured on film and analogue video tape are being re-mastered and re-released, material that the vast majority of us would otherwise not have the chance to watch and listen to.

It was Barenboim’s Beethoven sonata cycle on DVD that got me all fired up about Beethoven (particularly the late sonatas). I first encountered this DVD set when I watched Barenboim giving a masterclass with Jonathan Biss as pianist, on a flight way back in early 2007. It took me months to find it before accidentally coming across a link to it in the EMI catalogue.

Now it is Brendel’s Schubert DVD set that has helped me discover Schubert’s piano works for two hands. I saw it on Amazon.com some time ago, and finally decided to get it on account of some remarks that Brendel had made about Schubert (can’t remember where now). Each piece is accompanied by an introduction by Brendel. The performances are riveting. I am particularly grateful to the director of the series, who shot mostly from the left and slightly behind but some distance away from the piano. This allows the viewer full view of Brendel’s hands and feet. The latter allows the viewer to watch Brendel’s pedal technique. You can see how much he uses the damper pedal (I think too much), and how much (actually a surprising amount) he uses the una corda pedal to help him control dynamics.

If you are wondering why I am only now getting into Beethoven and Schubert, well, blame my past teachers.

My next piano will be…

…an Overs 225. I just need to find the space and the money for it! It’s frustrating when you can’t win the lottery on demand heheh.

Jokes aside, Ron Overs is a piano maker based in Sydney, and he makes the most astounding pianos. His website is here. You can listen to samples of the Overs 225 No.003 here. He hasn’t been updating the website much lately, but tells me that at least the ‘Pianos for sale’ section is up-to-date. Orders are now open for Overs 225 No.008!

One of the things that tipped me towards the Sauter Omega 220 was Ron’s recommendation to a couple of PW members to take a serious look at the Omega during their piano searches. He reckons that the Omega is a fine example of what can be achieved in a modern grand piano of this size. You can find the postings here and here. Also, back in 2006 there was a big fuss about whether or not Larry Fine would move Sauter into Tier 1. This was Ron’s comment. When someone like Ron says he likes a piano then there must be something there worth investigating.

[Edit: I was reading some old posts from June, and realised that I'd already written about Ron's opinion about the Omega! My apologies for repeating myself and sounding like a Sauter zealot in the process!]

If my aural memory of the Omega is reliable, I’m guessing that the Omega and the Overs 225 have similar tonal characteristics. I’ll know soon enough.

Two more Beethoven sonata editions!

I visited Sweet Classics in Shaw Centre yesterday, but they were closed. It was my first visit and I was hoping to find the Schnabel editions of the Beethoven sonatas there. I was also looking for the Schubert piano sonatas and the Wanderer Fantasy. I rang Sweet Classics many times this afternoon. Nobody picked up.

By mid-afternoon I was at The Adelphi, so hopped onto the MRT at City Hall station for the short ride to Dhoby Ghaut station and thence Plaza Singapore and Yamaha Music Plaza’s sheet music shop. And got partial satisfaction. I managed to get the Schnabel edition of the Beethoven sonatas, and the ABRSM/Cooper edition as well! Sadly, no Schubert, at least not what I was looking for.

These two editions are to supplement the Schenker edition which I usually play from. I use Schenker because it is generally considered to be the best researched ‘urtext’ edition. The Schnabel edition dates back to the first half of the 20th century. It famously includes very detailed editorial markup by Schnabel, who was considered to be one of the greatest Beethoven interpreters of the modern age. That’s of course subjective, but nevertheless pianists turned to Schnabel for ideas of interpretation and alternate fingering suggestions.

Cooper’s edition printed by the ABRSM is the most recent one, published in 2007. It too is an ‘urtext’ edition, and includes new Beethoven scholarship done by Cooper and others in the last 50 years or so. Cooper’s edition is spread over 3 volumes, and includes new commentary in the form of CDs (one per volume) and full-sized inserts containing very detailed notes.

Of students and piano teachers

My elder sister started piano lessons when she was in Primary 2. Our maternal grandfather bought her a Schimmel console piano to start her off. I was then in Primary 1.

Once a week Miss Penny Tang would come by to teach, and I’d hang around either outside door of the closed room or outside under the window just to listen in on what was happening. A couple of years later I asked to be allowed to take piano lessons as well. My sister and I would then visit Mrs Tan’s home studio (she’d gotten married by then) in River Valley Road for lessons.

My sister and I thoroughly enjoyed our lessons with Mrs Tan. She was very motivational and interacted very well with kids. I used to learn material ahead of what she assigned because I thought that the pace was too slow.

A few years later we switched teachers to a woman named Flora Lim. This was also when my two younger brothers were started on the piano. Unfortunately, this woman (who came with good recommendations, how I will never know) killed any interest that my brothers might have had for the piano. She was mean and draconian. She rapped hands with rulers, poked kids in the side of the head with the blunt end of her pencil, scolded and berated students for being unable to do what she wanted or expected. It was so unpleasant, bordering on the traumatic, that my brothers asked to stop piano lessons. They were nearly hysterical with fear when my parents were initially reluctant to let them stop.

I of course wanted to continue with the piano, but asked to be allowed to skip exams, playing only for enjoyment. My parents agreed, and switched my sister and I over first to Ms Cheung Mun Chit (a well-known accompanist) and then Mr Simplicius Cheong (a fairly well-known local jazz pianist). I even completed ‘O’ Level music with Mr Cheong. I can’t remember why we switched from Ms Cheung to Mr Cheong — must ask Mum tonight.

My brothers never returned to the piano, though my youngest brother did eventually pick up the guitar much later in life.

Our family moved to Australia after I finished Secondary 4. By then, my lessons-without-exams had gotten me to roughly ABRSM Grade 8 standard in terms of keyboard skills (but my theory lagged by a long way). There we had lessons with a Mrs Eileen Johnson. I was doing OK for a while, even winning the Intermediate piano section of the local Eistedfodd with the first movement of Beethoven’s Op.81a sonata. It was around this time that I started to feel the frustration that eventually led me to abandon the piano and not to resume until 2006.

As I advanced in ABRSM grades, none of the teachers that I had ever taught me how to practice nor showed me different keyboard technique to tackle specific problems posed by the music. In the meantime, my repertoire ambitions were growing, but my keyboard and practice skills were letting me down badly. Eventually I just gave up after a forced absence from the piano due to having to return to Singapore to do National Service.

I only found out what my teachers weren’t giving me when I started digging up piano-related material after starting again in 2006 and teaching myself. I don’t really regret what’s happened anymore. What’s important is that I am now so hooked on the piano, and enjoying myself immensely. I don’t plan on taking lessons, preferring instead to rely on my own reading, listening, watching (DVDs) and experimentation.

So the lessons learned from my frustrations are these:

• If you or your child decides to take the lessons-without-exams route, make sure the teacher covers the exam pieces in addition to any other music that student and teacher agree to do. The exam pieces were chosen to test on-going development of keyboard technique and musical sense, so being able to play them successfully will give the student some indication of how well they are progressing. It is also useful to have your music theory more or less congruent with your playing level.

• If you want your child to progress well and enjoy his/her time at the keyboard, ask to sit in on the occasional lesson to see what goes on. Also get feedback from your child about whether or not he/she is enjoying the time with the piano teacher. Educate yourself about the piano as much as possible. Who knows, if you don’t play yourself, you might just decide to do so and join the ranks of the adult beginners. It truly is never too late to start.

• In all cases, have a chat with the teacher and ask him/her to explain to you if and how they teach their students technique and practice skills.

Omega has left the factory!

Will know ETA once Alvin receives the shipping documents. I’ll be in Tokyo from 9 – 12 July, so it’d better not arrive then!

Do you get the value that you paid for?

This thread on PW is about problems that a PW member in Singapore is having with his/her Brodmann BG187 grand piano. I’m always upset when I hear of people paying good money for a supposedly value-for-money piano, and then not getting the value that they paid for.

The danger of buying a mass-produced piano is that QA levels in the factory are lower than in a low-volume manufacturer like Sauter, Grotrian, Bluthner, Boesendorfer, or Steingraeber. The high-volume manufacturer’s expectation is that the dealer becomes an extension of the manufacturing process, providing the finishing and final prep that would normally done by a low-volume manufacturer in the factory. If the dealer either doesn’t want to (or is not capable of) doing that work then the buyer ends up with a piano that is not close to what it can be.

Admittedly the money that the dealer must spend to prep a piano before delivery eats into their thin margins. So most dealers just give their pianos a quick tune and polish and shove them out the door. How much time and money is needed after that to get the piano to approach its full capability depends on the manufacturer. You’ll likely suffer less pain with the likes of Yamaha and Kawai and others who have reasonably high QA standards despite being high-volume piano manufacturers.

Withdrawal symptoms getting worse

I now bring photocopies of the two Beethoven sonatas I am working on with me on business trips, and familiarising myself with the score and trying out fingering on an imaginary piano!

Waiting for Alvin to confirm that the Omega did indeed leave the factory last Friday as scheduled.

Edit: Actually come to think of it, I’ll continue to do that because it helps to keep my ‘piano muscles’ in reasonable shape.

The difference between me and Claudio Arrau

A recent post on PW about Charles Rosen’s views on creating a beautiful sound prompted me to finally write this post about something that I’ve been struggling to put my finger on for a long time.

I have heard it said that the same piano can sound very different in the hands of different pianists. To me that is a self-evident truth. But some people then go on to imply that it is somehow possible for a better pianist to play individual notes in such a way that they sound qualitatively ‘better’ than when played by a less accomplished pianist. The question is how differently can a single note be played, and how do pianists really sound different from each other.

The only controls you have over a single note are how loud it is and how long it lasts for. If you are lucky and you have a half-decent piano, then the timbre of the note also changes depending on how loud the note is played. In other words, if Claudio Arrau (for example) and I were both to play the note A4 on the same piano at exactly the same loudness and hold it for exactly the same length of time, then it would sound exactly the same tonally. It is impossible to stroke the key of that A4 in any other way to make the note sound tonally different at the same loudness and sustain time.

Loudness and timbre depend on the impulse that the hammer applies at the strike point on the string. (Impulse is the force with which the hammer strikes the string and the time interval over which that force is applied.) In all upright and grand actions, the hammer is in free flight over the last 1.5 – 3 mm before it strikes the string because, after let off, it is no longer being mechanically accelerated by the key stroke. (I don’t think the flex in the hammer shank makes a difference once the hammer is in free flight.) The mass of the hammer is constant, which means that Newton’s Second Law of Motion is in effect, and it says that force = mass x acceleration. So with hammer mass constant, acceleration nil, and hammer in free flight, the force applied at the strike point is mass x velocity. I am glossing over some of the physics (in particularly the vectors), but in essence I believe that there is no way of applying ‘body language’ to the way the impulse is applied. Pianos are not pinball machines!

So if I can play any individual note in exactly the same way as Claudio Arrau can, then what, in general makes one pianist sound completely different from another, assuming that both can ‘play the notes’ without error. Here Rosen offers the difference. It is one of balance, that of individual notes in relation to other notes. That balance is both vertical and horizontal.

It is vertical within a chord, where the balance lies in how loud one note is in relation to the others.

It is horizontal, where the balance lies in how loud and long one note is in relation to the others before and after it in time. That balance is strongest within the same rhythmic group, then within the phrase, then within musical sections (e.g., first subject, second subject, development, recapitulation, theme, variations, movements, entire piece).

This intersection of the vertical and the horizontal means that there are an amazingly large number of ways of playing even very short and simple pieces of music. And that’s why it is impossible to play a piece exactly the same way every time. The only way to exactly reproduce a performance is to record the performance on a player piano. And even then it isn’t technically speaking 100% accurate (even though it may sound so to the human ear).

And the difference between me and Claudio Arrau? Apart from the fact that he’s a virtuoso and I’m a keyboard klutz? He does the ‘balancing’ act much better than I do.

Edit: Here is one investigation of the mechanics of tone production. The authors are ambivalent about whether or not the pianist’s touch can influence the tone of a note in any way at all. What is truly amazing is that the hammer/string interface is very complex. It is dependent on the location of the strike point, the mass and length of the string, the flex and vibrational modes of the hammer shank, the compression characteristics of the hammer felt, and the overall mass of the hammer/shank assembly.

Withdrawal symptoms

It is pouring with rain. Big, fat, heavy drops, in torrents. Not of the cats and dogs variety, but of the elephants and hippos type. And I sorely miss having a piano at home. I largely work from home when not on business travel, so I quite often go and play on the piano during breaks. Haven’t had a chance to pop into Raffles Piano to play on on the Sauter Alpha. But Alvin is not well, so I’d rather not bother him anyway.

Looks like I’ll really have to pull the old Roland A-80 keyboard controller and the EMU Proteus 1/XR sound module out from mothballs. Maybe next weekend after I’m back from Dubai.

Another delay :(

I heard from Alvin this morning that the Omega will finally leave the factory for crating on June 20th. That means an arrival sometime in mid- to late-July. Don’t know what the delay is, but that’s OK. I have complete trust in the factory to prepare this piano properly, so if they say it has to be delayed then so be it.