5. Il Penseroso

Il Penseroso by Stephen Heller is an interesting piece for having the melody in the left hand. In fact, that was the principle of its inclusion based on J. T.'s requirement that every lesson contain something new. It also previews (I think) some of the  techniques required for Chopin's Prelude in B Minor coming up at the book's halfway mark. That has left-hand melody, too, and even the text looks a bit like it! The arpeggios in the right hand are the challenging part of the text, however, despite their supporting role. I think it's a bit odd that this piece should feature the left hand and still have the right hand doing the difficult manoeuvres. Not only is it surprising that the main role should be so simple (compared to the accompaniment) and still be able to stand out, but also that it doesn't require more of the left hand—since that's the hand whose technique gets neglected all the time. The opening above shows the first fluttering arpeggio, and notice they should be played lightly (leggiero). The overall direction for the piece requires pacing and tenderness. So... light and tender. The landscape of the arpeggio is rugged. Five separate notes alternating between black and white keys, and it does stretch the hand much in the same way Chopin's chords did in Prelude in C Minor. In this case, however, the hand must travel fluidly from one end to the next, and that requires some work. It's paying work, though. The arpeggios that follow are of a similar order.

The chord progression in the first bar pictured here (right) sounds great. It goes from a diminished C in second inversion to a G minor struck twice. The progression in the next bar from the E octave (with G added) to C has a vaguely familiar sound to it and passes satisfyingly on to an F-B♭ dyad, which I can never settle on holding with 5-3 or 5-2 fingering (LH). It should be 5-3. Let's see if I remember that.

The middle section moves on to these octaves. They begin with D's and then switch to G's, and each set moves a semitone to the left before resettling on their respective notes. Note the legato slurs between the bars. I think it requires that my fingers slide off the F# / C# and then back down to the G/D, but I haven't quite perfected that manoeuvre. Notice how the pedal breaks strategically to ensure that it provides no help with that aspect of the performance. Thanks, Heller! The right hand accompaniment to that is a three-pronged semiquaver group that flutters atop the octaves in a peculiar pattern that repeats later on when the opening theme is repeated. This is a good thing: it means this form isn't learned in vain but transfers to later parts of the song.

Next we have some ascending broken chords that look a bit like those found in Bach's Prelude in C Major (from The Well-Tempered Clavier). I compared the texts as soon as I noticed the resemblance. No cigar. Anyway, these are interesting. On the page the first group looks like an A minor broken triad, but since E's are flattened (the song is in B♭ major), it ends up being a diminished chord followed by... something for which I have no name—a progression of notes. But then the left hand takes this opportunity to travel up an octave or so and then back down to the notes with which the song began.

Not surprisingly, the opening repeats, but this time with variation. All left-hand notes not previously covered with right-hand flutterings now receive some. An example is shown here. The chord progression I commented on earlier now receives a lengthening of the duration for which the first chord is held and a corresponding shortening of the second chord. The right hand also comes in for one of those three-note semiquavers I mentioned before. The entire theme is played with these sorts of modifications and then the middle section (and this theme) is repeated once more before the ending ensues.

It is introduced thus:

The left hand travels from B♭ down to an F octave and then transitions to a perfect fifth (B♭-F). The right hand does some interesting chordal stuff, too, apart from the arpeggios, which themselves contain a progression of notes that harmonise with that of the left hand. (Incidentally, the RH arpeggio has been repeated quite a bit throughout the piece, so it's already quite familiar. Just one more note is tacked on before A-C and B♭-D  are played with the dyads mentioned above.) Then, repeat.

Finally, the left hand joins the right in a longer progression down the keyboard, one that plugs the gaps previously sustained in the left hand (but still with the right hand sneaking notes in between the quavers). This ends with chords similar to the ones named in the paragraph above, but then they're repeated two octaves higher to really punctuate the song's conclusion. The hands cross in a sort of bird-wing fashion to hold them, too, so that the middle notes of the four-note chord are held by the thumbs and the end notes by the fourth fingers in each hand. Thus it's a visually as well as aurally aesthetic ending. Nice job, Heller :o)

Alan Chan's rendition

4. Petite Russian Rhapsodie

This song is a little bit fun to play and a little bit hard, too. The middle gets to be fast once you really get to know it, so I have already been trying to drum the notes into my fingers so I can start working on my speed. The hardest part for me seems to be the slow opening (top left), which is also repeated at the end. I find that strange, but I also wonder if I practise the other parts a bit more (for the reasons I gave above) and therefore just haven't put enough time into learning the slower section(s). The challenge of this portion is the arpeggios. I need to focus a bit before I can pull them off, and I think it has to do with the transitions from playing infinitely slowly (i.e. not playing, since it's the beginning of the piece) to playing those notes as quickly as they should be played. I had this problem with Nobody Knows back in the Third Grade Book. The transition from moderately slow melody to fast Alberti bass also caused some flubs in Boccherini's Minuet—and I recall anticipating that it would help with the transition to the fast left-hand arpeggios in Mozart's Sonata in C (K545). Well, it has, to some degree, though I'm still experiencing a bit of a pause where that's concerned. But I digress...

Other interesting portions of the opening are the several chord progressions. See pic above (bottom). I like the chords in that passage; they're teaching me a lot about consonance and dissonance. Some are pretty hard, though. The fingering for this progression that ends the opening is a case in point. The left hand is fine, but the right felt a little weird and stretchy at first—though looking at it on the page, it seems quite logical. I guess separating the pinky from the 4th while trying to hold the pinky down is a bit unintuitive to my fingers... (yeah, I know... what's finger intuition?)

This bit of the opening section mixes the hard arpeggios with very challenging chord progressions! Check out that monstrosity in the first bar. It's a fast broken chord that spans beyond an octave: F-C-A in the left hand. It's pretty murderous. I had tremendous trouble getting the rhythm of that section in my head (much less my fingers!) largely due to the delay elicited by that difficult half-beat. What often happens is that my thumb hits G instead of A, not realizing that even that isn't enough of a stretch. It doesn't help that it's followed by a semiquaver that requires some hand independence--not too challenging since Dorothy, but it did take some time, and therefore added even further delay to the already screwed-up timing. I just started getting the rhythm right yesterday (Apr. 18).  

Finally, this jump from an acciaccatura to a chord way up above was more difficult than the ones in The Skaters and Hungarian Rhapsodie 2 because, not only is it a strange Esus chord, but this is also the accompanying chord in the right hand and both require attention to get right. So hard to divide that attention! What I do is use the pedal to sustain the current notes and then set up the right hand to hold that Esus with added tonic. Then I switch attention to the left hand grace-note jump. The result is that I'm better prepared to strike Esus in both hands at the appropriate time. I didn't realise piano playing would require so much scheming! 

Because this piece is a rhapsodie, it's structured as a farrago of different rhythms and melodies sutured together into an organic whole. Each part is an adaptation of a Russian folk song... much like Lizst's Hungarian Rhapsodies are a melding of various Hungarian folk tunes. So, after the slower (but complex) intro, the piece launches into a fast, staccato section with A and E chords in the left hand alternating between their tonic and suspended forms (top left pic). Then it follows with variations on the same theme, but with broken chords in the left hand and broken dyads in the right. Soon it exchanges staccato for semiquavers (second pic above). 

Slower staccatos ensue to slacken the pace, but then it picks up again to some fast semiquavers (not shown) similar to those already pictured above.

Next some faster staccato chords...

And a big finish!

Finally, a return to the slow opening theme, which has now become the closing theme. It ends familiarly:

Alan Chan's rendition

3. Aragonaise

 Massenet again, and not a moment too soon! I took a light look at this song yesterday, and I think it won't be too hard to learn. It's got a sonatina flavour. So far, I haven't played very many sonatinas—only two by Clementi, and just the first movements (more or less). I like Aragonaise better than your average sonatina, though, and I'm looking forward to doing some "close finger action." That's a term J.T. uses, and at first it perplexed me, but I soon figured out that it means keeping your fingers close enough to the keys to execute some fast runs.

...

Two weeks after making that bold statement, I'm now five-days post learning the song completely. While I was right—it wasn't that hard to learn—there were a couple days in there when I was a bit confused about which parts fit where, because this was another one of those songs in which each part is a variation on another. Easy to learn; easy to become disoriented. I've been challenging myself to do it fast now that I've learned all the notes because I think that I perhaps don't push myself enough in that area when it comes to playing fast in actual songs. I pretty much only play fast in C Major scales. Not a good track record.

The close finger action is alright. I find that while I can do it, my fingers are still prone to spastic movements than demonstrate the extent to which they still require disciplining. Their shortcomings are especially evident at these parts of the text where I'm required to repeat a fast 4-3-2-1 pattern in the right hand (See above and to the left). I'm used to going from the thumb straight back to the 5th and not the 4th finger, so the poor 4th is experiencing a lot of pressure right now, and its first reaction is of course to buckle. The pic to the left is the hardest to play because the 4th finger is up on F# and the hand is angled in a way that forces the fingers to move a little sideways while doing the run. Getting there, though.

This part is fun to hear. It requires the tiniest leap from E up to B, but then the short chromatic that goes 5-4-5 in the pic you'll see I've changed to 5-4-4. I just slide the 4th finger down onto the A and it works great because the left hand's doing it's thing with the 4th finger at that moment too. I naturally had some trouble with that leap at first until I realized I could just stretch the pinky down there and it was all good. The left hand pivot from that F to the A-D# dyad was a little more tricky. The hard part was landing the D# and not slipping off onto some adjacent white key.

Then we have the strident chord passage, which I like a lot. The pedal is very important to making it not seem choppy and allowing you to move your hands as quickly as you need to in order to get to each new chord. I neglected to play it with pedal at first because I didn't realize how helpful pedals can be in chorded situations. I thought they were unnecessary—I know, did I learn nothing from Chopin's Prelude in C Minor?? 

Here's another one of those chromatiques. There are a bunch of those short passages in this song, and I took pictures of all of them, but maybe that was overdoing it.

Here's a hand-over-hand passage that follows the B-A-G-F# runs in the right hand. Those runs also require an angling of the hand that I'm still working on. They go directly into a progression of about four such runs down the keyboard to end up on the same E the song started out on. This brings on a repetition of the opening theme leading up to the grand finale.

So... the grand finale involves a variation on the strident passage and then a run that extends far beyond the usual four repeated descending notes. I found it astonishing and cool that it we pedal through a half scale. (See centre of picture left.) I also didn't realize pedaling could be euphonious outside of chorded situations. But of course it worked beautifully and now I look forward to hearing it whenever I play. Have to be careful to play that F-A at the end correctly and not sneak a G in there, as my fingers are wont to do.

The song ends with a sextuple (six-pack?) of those four-note runs, half of which is pictured right. It ends with a dot: B in staccato. Then a single key striking out the rhythm of those strident chords, and finally a G chord in staccato shared between the hands. See pic below. I like the way the strident note is pedalled, but I have to make sure to lift it in time to strike that last chord or the staccato won't sound. There's more practice doing that fast pedal-to-staccato transition in the song that follows—Petite Russian Rhapsodie—which I'm already almost finished memorising because I'm so woefully behind in this blog. But at least the practice isn't flagging! :)

Alan Chan's rendition

Extras