Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Do the top Pianists ever take short cuts or "cheat" ?

Following my previous post on this site regarding the opening chords of Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto and how to get araound playing them if you have relatively small hands.

I would like to know if anyone out there has heard of any trade secrets regarding notoriously difficult peices and how top flight pianists have perhaps cheated , or know of accepted manipulations of the said music.

I don't know whether any concert pianists cheat, but based on personal knowledge I'm convinced that ALL professional symphonic string players cheat.

I took part in a masterclass with concert pianist Yuliya Gorenman and one of the things she said is that one of the biggest differences between an amateur and a seasoned professional is that a season professional has no shame (when it comes to "cheating"). So...cheat away!

The definition to me of a musical "cheat" is that, to the audience, it sounds the same as playing the piece as it is written.

A music teacher of mine decades ago insisted to me that music performance is the ultimate practical science, or, as Duke Ellington put it, "If it sounds good, it IS good." My teacher's point was that whatever makes the music sound good to the listener is fair game for the performer.

I am sure that some of them do, if they can make it sound identical (to the audience) but make the piece easier for them personally. My own teacher is always encouraging me to do block rhythms on especially long, fast, difficult passagework. So if you consider that "cheating," I would think a lot of people do that. Even if the notes aren't spot on click-click-click-click-click even, it can still sound just as impressive.

I'm sure this has come up at some point: Richard Kastle.

This guy makes all these claims about a "secret" method and would make a huge deal that Horowitz and the greats "faked" the ending of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. The way he talks makes him sound like a wacko, but the funny thing is, some of his originals aren't terrible. He's too off-putting to like though.

Edit: Here's the link. Lots of crazy cult-like babbling, worth a listen just for the humour:

That is fantastic ! ....is it a spoof or for real?...who is the pianist?.

He name drops in a brilliant way .I loved it.

More please.

Thanks for all your replies so far.
Perhaps we are all being fooled that the great pianists out there are actually playing every note as written !.

Glad you enjoyed it. As far as I know, he's for real, and has composed some large scale works you can find on YouTube. I would take everything he says with a grain of salt though, a lot of it seems like he just wants to stir the pot for his view count and popularity.

Why would that be such a secret? Can't everybody read? One can follow the sheet music while an artist is playing. and...?

Is this in reference to the link I posted? If it is, I agree. I don't like the guy and think he's an idiot. I also think it really doesn't matter that much if they're "cheating" a bit on the end, as long as the musical and emotional effect is the same.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "cheats", but my teacher has quite a few tricks regarding redistribution of notes between hands for lots of pieces including Beethoven's "Les Adieux" and "Waldstein"; Brahms's Handel Variations, the list goes on and on. And she'll tell you "most pianists perform it that way." One of the most obvious "cheats" is in the Chopin 2nd Scherzo. Right after the con animo section, there are those alternating arpeggios between the left and right hand and then there is the long one down in D-flat major. Kissen, Zimmerman and Yundi Li are among some of the pianists (me included)who divide it between the two hands.

As long as all the same notes are being played, I don't think it's cheating at all. Some composers notate music so that musical intentions and lines are as clear as possible. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that they meant for you to play it only with that hand distribution. For some composers like Liszt and Bach, I think we can pretty safely assume from their personalities that they would not care a whit about hand redistribution. With other more fussy composers, they may have cared, but I don't, as long as the musical result is equivalent or better than when I played it the original way.

I'm obviously not a top pianist, but since I AM doing some redistributions in my current rep, I figured I would share them. In the third movement of Beethoven Op. 28, there's an awkward right hand passage:

[img]http://www.box.com/s/d90242b49d94059d98bf[/img]

The upper voice is easy enough, but with the lower voice in the right hand, suddenly the upper voice becomes hard to articulate. It's a big stretch on a couple of chords, but I redistribute so that the lower voice of the treble clef is played by the left hand.

Then in the Chopin Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4, the introductory and concluding melody goes like this:

[img]http://www.box.com/s/521fcebc3e388bd59353[/img]

I think the final note of this melody is much better articulated by the right hand, giving continuity from the turn. I have a hard time imagining that Chopin would have disliked this, as it simply serves to let the melody stand out more.

However, I think that redistribution CAN be done poorly. Horowitz is one top pianist who was well recognized to be a big redistributer. I'm a really big fan of him in a lot of repertoire, but I think he does some things in the Chopin 1st Ballade that are not musically justified. At the last descending scale in the coda, he redistributes the right hand notes to two hands and effectively double-times the progression to the bottom note:



I think this totally changes the affect of the gesture, and takes away drama, rather than adding any.

(There's still a lot to admire in his performance though)

Donno what's wrong with my images and video...

Redistribution of hands in arpeggios, chords etc isn't 'cheating' in my book. All the right notes are still played in the right order. That possibly also applies to Horowitz's turning the conclusion of Chopin's B minor Scherzo into interlocking octaves for extra effect. But if certain notes are left out in order to make things easier, that's cheating, even if the results aren't actually audible.

But what if the pianist actually makes things harder for himself by adding notes or extra melodic lines or beefing up the harmony? Like Cyprien Katsaris did in his Beethoven/Liszt Symphonies recordings and performances, adding notes from the original orchestral score that Liszt left out? That to me is entirely apt - as long as he's able to do it (which he is).

Sometimes, certain pianists rewrite passages to make a more impressive visual (and occasionally audible) effect - again Horowitz is the frequent culprit here - but the rewrite may be actually easier to play......

I don't consider any redistribution of hands as cheating.
I consider missing out notes etc as cheating, or tricks of the trade.
There are possibly known manipulations of difficult passages that pianists in the know might do perhaps?

So "Rach had Big Hands" is not 'cheating!'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ifKKlhYF53w

That's a comedy video.

During my teacher's lessons with Horowitz, Horowitz freely shared that he would deliberately drop notes and change notes. V.H.'s philosophy was, do what you have to do to make it sound beautiful.

Wow, with Horowitz himself? What an honor.

How so?

Bingo!

Wow, Vladimir Howorowitz is my hero.

Thanks

As for Cyprien Katsaris, I have nothing but respect and admiration for his monumental performances of all the Beethoven/Liszt Symphonies.

As for Horowitz, his rewritten passages (and, transcriptions) puts him in a league by himself. Many try to emulate him, and, don't succeed!

Why is this alleged 'cutting corners' OK? For example, Horowitz [my favorite] changes things because he does not like or can't play a few bars. Other players can't play his changes. I thought slavish conformity to the score is the rule for classical players. especially pros. Just asking..

Hi, Deborah!!!!!!

-Daniel

yay! glad to see you back!
Is your Waldstein "sabbatical" over? I know you put it aside for a while.

I'll restart in about 2 or 3 weeks. It's mostly memorized, except for the intro. I'm slaving over Liszt's Petrarch 104 right now. It's HARD.

Richard Kastle seems to have a point and he is one of the best players of that fragment.

CHeck this video that compares all these endings of Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.2

>Can't everybody read? One can follow the sheet music while an artist is playing. and...?

Check that video for yourself... Can you follow the sheet music while they are playing? Honestly I can not really when they are playing these massive chords at neckbreaking speed with pedal down. Well you can clearly hear when they are goofing up big time or when they are not playing the syncopations. But not all the notes.

Yes, I've seen that. He plays it impressively, but in the end, does it matter that much?

If you were just listening you would not be able to tell the difference as to whether people were leaving out notes. The dynamics and phrasing is a different issue, but it really doesn't matter to me much that Horowitz or Hamelin left out notes, as long as the musical effect is achieved. It's not exactly a complex harmony where leaving a note out would be glaringly obvious.

Didn't Brendel once say that everybody cheated in the Brahms 2nd concerto? That's an exaggeration, surely, but I think probably many do. Those fast double-note runs...

Kastle played the best version, IMO, so he can walk the walk. Frankly this issue really personalizes the artists. I like the notion that they need a 'work around.' Liszt is just hard to play!

I find it fascinating that concert pianists as super competent as Horowitz, Brendel ,Lang Lang etc do still have " work arounds" to enable them to play passages of music that they cannot play. I would imaging pianists of that stature could get their fingers around anything!

Not so, it seems. At least they're trying.

A friend of mine -whose opinion and powers of observation I respect- told me that Perahia made a lot of simplifications in the Chopin G# minor ('thirds') etude in concert. I asked him sort of incredulously: 'then why play it all?', to which he replied 'because it's beautiful music'.

I don't have Perahia's studio recording handy to compare.

Is that remark meant to say that the part Chopin wrote is beautiful, as well as the part Perahia, the performer, wrote, too ? friend likes 'em both!

I haven't actually read or heard any of them say it, but I imagine there is some kind of ratio of time spent practicing a difficult passage against musical value of that passage. It's not that they can't do it, but it isn't worth the massive effort for minimal value. Or something like that.

It's also a lot easier to put notes on paper than it is to execute them. Composers have been known to write music that cannot actually be played by human beings on a given instrument.

One of the piano professors at the university where I did my undergrad left an awkward note out of one of the fast scales in Prokofiev's 2nd violin sonata (somewhere in the 2nd mvmt, I forget exactly which one without a score in front of me). I was playing this piece at the same time she was and one of her students passed on the piece of advice.

The funny thing is, according to another one of her students, she chewed him out for suggesting a couple notes to leave out in the last mvmt of the Ravel trio...

I'm playing the Prokofiev 3rd concerto right now, and I admit there are two notes I leave out in the third mvmt. But nobody (including my teacher and the conductor) has noticed so far! Heh.

This is a concept I extend to entire pieces. In contemporary repertoire there's a lot that's quite difficult. The decision I make is whether it is worth it TO ME to take upon myself all that work (i.e., do I believe in the integrity of the work and its level of intrinsic interest). I'm willing to take on a piece that will take a year to learn (given other obligations) if it is illuminating and helps me grow musically or intellectually.

I'm very happy to cast aside works that don't make the cut...even if a famous piece by a famous composer. Less time out of my life.

I think that is a very valid point.

The most blatant example I've heard of a top-class pianist cheating was Elisabeth Leonskaya playing the notorious octave scales near the end of the first section of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy as single notes, trying to make them sound strenuous when they are actually child's play when played as single-note scales.

I just wondered - if you can't play those octaves as written (you can always make a slight agogic ritenuto like many pianists do, if you really can't play them accurately in tempo), why play the Wanderer at all? To me, it just makes a mockery of what Schubert intended. It is like playing the octave glissandi variation of the Brahms/Pag as single note scales or glissandi, completely missing the point.

Other examples of cheating - though not quite in the same league, and most pianists actually do them - are not playing the octave glissandi in the finale of Beethoven's Waldstein as octave glissandi and having to leave out a few notes to do so; similarly in Beethoven's 1st Piano Concerto, though here you can play it as an octave scale without missing out any notes.

But here's a perspective to consider. Suppose you cannot play those octaves at speed. You have two options: to play them as single notes, or to slow down slightly. It is probably better to slow down as you suggest, but I don't think it's black-and-white. The way I see it, one option is a distortion of texture; the other is a distortion of rhythmic pulse. Which is the lesser evil? I think it's a fair question, and I think we shouldn't automatically label the option which leaves out notes as the greater evil. The point is not to hit all the notes!

Here's another example. Last year my father was working on Beethoven's op.101, and towards the end of the first movement, there's a sequence of increasingly intense chords (diminished? I think). One of the chords at the end of the sequence was too big a stretch, and he was rolling it. But I noticed that that chord was easily playable if one left out one of the inner voices, and so here we had the same kind of question: which is the lesser evil, to not play every note on the score, or to commit a rhythmic violation? In this case, I argued (and he agreed) that the first approach was better.

-J

This reminds me of one time when I turned pages for a 2-piano concert (performed by professional pianists). One of the pieces was an arrangement of the Nutcracker Suite - I seem to recall Argerich was one of the people involved in creating the arrangement but this was years ago so I could be remembering wrongly. Anyways, I noticed some really fast octave scales coming up and I remember looking to see how in the world the pianist would do them, but she just played them as regular scales.

I suppose simplifying some octave scales in a performance of a transcribed work could be seen as a bit different story than taking the same short cut in a work originally meant for piano.

I think that in a transcription, anything goes, especially if you are the transcriber/arranger. But in a great composer's work, if you simplify/cheat and the result is clearly audibly different (as it is in the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy example mentioned earlier; not so much in the Beethoven Waldstein), I'd say that you shouldn't do it. But that's just my opinion - Liszt after all changed his own music on the spur of the moment, and many pianists leave out notes or simplified his textures (often unnoticeable in performance or recording) if they see fit. But simplify Schubert (even in a Lisztian piece like the Wanderer)?

Can't play fast octaves? You just have to practice more :P No such thing as octaves or chords that are too fast, unless you have a hand size => stretching problem.

I think it's best to try your best to follow, and then if everything is going fine except some spot where you absolutely have no way of playing it, then cheat if you have to, and don't tell anyone!

Well on the old pianos you could actually do an octave glissando with 1 hand without too much efford. On a modern grand this is hard if possible at all (anyone who can do it here? I can sort of because of my big hands but even then I'm not really fond of the result)



You have this same issue with Debussy fille aux cheveux de lin. There are wide chords are there not written as arpeggio's, but virtually everyone plays them as arpeggios or broken chords. Even my hands were too small for 1 chord even after changing the note-to-hand distributions and I dropped one inner note.

Well on the old pianos you could actually do an octave glissando with 1 hand without too much efford. On a modern grand this is hard if possible at all (anyone who can do it here? I can sort of because of my big hands but even then I'm not really fond of the result)

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I've not played a Broadwood of Beethoven's time, but I've played on Pleyel and Erard grands of Chopin's time, and octave glissandi are fairly easy on them because of their shallower, lighter action. But I've also heard quite a few female pianists playing the Brahms/Pag superbly on modern pianos, so smaller hands aren't necessarily an insurmountable problem in octave glissandi - for some.....

Do you believe that all females have smaller hands?

Yes - when you compare a man and a woman of the same height, the woman's hand span is almost always smaller. So is the size of her feet.

That may very well be true, but we can't just say, "females can play this or that, so hand size doesn't matter". It has nothing to do with being female.

I heard that due to Scriabin's small hands, he rolled many chords when playing his compositions (I can't remember whether the source mentioned if he did this in other people's compositions). Apparently he did this whether or not he had indicated the chord to be rolled.

I seem to recall that he didn't play his etude in 9ths because it was too difficult for his hand size.

This doesn't actually sound likely, I have a hard time believing it's true, but it could be right.

For what it's worth, in my experience replace "woman" with "Asian" and that statement becomes true though Not complaining about my 10 key reach though, it's more than adequate.