Chopin Sonatas @ Amazon.com
|
There are two composers from the mutual exercise amount of time whose solo piano music will exhaust a pianist more immediate than any other. Chopin is merciless in his physical demands on the performer. One “impossible” passage follows another, each one harder for the fact that one is exhausted from the last. I mean physical exhaustion, like your wrists are shaking from too a great deal of octaves, or the tendons on the top of your arms start out to pain from such contorted hand positions. Chopin puts difficult passages, as one would expect, in the right hand, and his right hand parts are wonders in themselves: cogent, contrapuntally perfective and ever lyric and natural. But the Chopin left hand, like the male ballet dancer, ought to do stoic work at the same time, and Chopin never made his left hand share a mere accompaniment. Chopin is distinctive in that his demands are made of both hands in reasonably equivalent measure. He had no fear of awkward positions and expected that pianists would find solutions to his daunting problems. Beethoven made similar demands, if more or less less lyrically than Chopin. If you ever doubted what a outstanding pianist Beethoven was before he went deaf, look at galore of the right hand elements in the Sonatas. His right hand figuration is not in truth pianistic in the way Chopin’s is. Difficult as they are, Chopin’s figures (arpeggios) always fit a lot of physical logic in the hand. Beethoven never does. He never follows what is physically gracious, opting rather for the music itself to be perfect, and the pianist is then left to struggle with what are ofttimes almost insurmountable physical and technical problems. A perfective example is the finale to the famed Moonlight Sonata, a tangled frenzy in the closely inconceivable key of C Sharp Minor. Yet within that mass of physical difficulties lies music of such perfection that the musician is inspired to find ways to master the knotty Beethovenian language. Chopin would not like to be noted in the same breath as Beethoven, for he found Beethoven’s music awkward and ugly. Most helpful customer reviews 10 of 13 people found the following review helpful. 13 of 25 people found the following review helpful. The sonatas are the best recording you can get with all three there but that said, their not all interesting… In my oppinion they are flawless, but not musical, they’re bland and they have lost my intrest when he plays them here. Some moments are absoultely gorgeous, but in the end he dosn’t really piece together his ideas in a logical and drawing way… I wish that I could give you the name of someone who has done dinomite recordings of all of these but I don’t know who you should go to for better. these are just my thoughts… |
Splendid double!
Very Good