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I think I'm going to give up 30 3, and pick something else. I may regret this(actually I'm pretty sure I will), but think I want to learn something faster. 30 3 isn't too bad (which is why I originally picked it hehehe) if someone wants to give it a go. I'll know what I want by next Tuesday.

AimeeO, if you are giving up 30/3 Adagio non troppo in E, I will gladly take it over. It looks a bit easier than my current 38/4 (and Henle agrees with me).

Have you made any headway on this, Wisebuff? I can offer some suggestions but all are a compromise.

I wouldn't have taken on my piece without the 3 months or so allotted to the recital, it's one of the more difficult I've tried although the metronome marking for it is a heck of a lot slower than e.g. Barenboim takes it so that will mitigate somewhat. At least I have a choice and I love 67,2 at both medium or brisk.

In recording, unless I'm playing something relatively simple, I tend to tense up as I approach the end - that's especially true when I've made a good start as there's then more at stake. For that reason I jumped, soon after starting, to the last page and that will get a periodic (extra) work-out while honing up the rest of the piece. That'll help me relax when it comes time to record.

Other than what I hear intuitively in the way of form, harmonic analysis would serve me no purpose but I can see how systematically breaking down a structure can help provide a road map for some.

Memorise in small musical units, complete or half-complete morsels. Zone in on the smallest neighbourhood - as little as 2 beats - of a persistent problem and try and form a playable loop. Repeat until confident then gradually expand the loop to take in more of the leading and trailing notation.

At the outset I only pay attention to fingering (so, so important as a cue) and note lengths. Without going out of my way to avoid expression I never consciously attend to it (speed or volume) until the notes of the entire piece are reasonably confident at which point I have my blank canvas.

Excellent post, dire tonic. Each paragraph has impact and importance on this recital and is worth re-reading. This last one is especially worth paying attention to. I've recently discussed this with another on this forum who prefers to tend to one thing at a time and this method fits into it nicely.

My own preference is to memorise the piece in my head after audiating from the score (my blank canvas) and frequently singing it to myself so my interpretation is formed as a perfect idea before I sit down to the piano, uncluttered by the imperfections thrown up by my fingers, and I consequently pay attention to every last detail of each snippet before I move on. It's not for everyone.

Also I agree that a harmonic analysis in lyrical pieces like these is less important than a melodic one especially if the phrases aren't marked in. Performers whose intuitive ability is not backed up with as much experience might spend a little time looking where the phrases stop and start and use this to break the piece into musically integral units rather than just two or three bars arbitrarily.

Expression

Thinking about what dire tonic and Richard have said, as I've been practicing memorizing my Clementi Sonatina, I have discovered that I definitely want to learn the dynamics and articulation as I'm learning the fingering, which is to say, learn them all at the same time as I'm working initially on the piece in morsels. I mention this as coming from work on Clementi, but everything I'm learning about memorizing will be very applicable to my work on my Mendelssohn Song Without Words for this themed recital. (Richard, you have convinced me to tackle memorizing my Mendelssohn.)

Now, in working on a morsel I will probably get the fingering first, and then work on the expression. But I want to have memorized the expression before I move on to the next morsel. This is because the expression as indicated in the score may not be what I would myself think of as obvious for the piece (and this is even more true for the Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, with their sudden dynamics changes), so if I don't learn them on the first pass, then I have to go through a second time with a whole new layer of learning the notated expression.

Also I am finding that I need practice in swelling and shrinking a phrase, and it's good for me to get that practice from the very beginning, rather than spend a lot of time learning to play without expression. I want all my playing to have expression, and there's no reason to artificially cut my practice time for expression in half by ignoring expression for the whole first part of my learning.

As I get the piece very comfortably under my fingers, I expect I will be able to put even more expression into it, so in that sense I don't have the final expression from the very beginning. Also as I get more familiar with the piece, I will find new nuances of expression I want to put into it. But I will have the outlines of the notated expression from the very beginning.

Analysis

More thoughts from thinking about dire tonic's and Richard's posts: Harmonic analysis is the first analytical tool I learned, so it is always my first thought on looking at a piece. I am learning from Richard's prodding how to do other types of analysis, and I agree that melodic analysis is particularly important in a Song Without Words, for example to give ideas for how to shape the phrases.

But things I learn from harmonic analysis of a piece include:

It gets me to look very closely at all the notes. Then I branch off into looking at patterns in the notes in other ways than harmonically. Other people might have other ways of getting up close and personal with the notes, but for me harmonic analysis gives me that starting point.

It tells me things about the phrases, like where they begin and end, or where a phrase ends on an unsettled chord and only resolves with the first note of the next phrase, which tells me something about possible interpretation. Other people can probably hear things like this easily, and don't need to do the formal analysis, but for me the harmonic analysis gives me big clues about what to listen for that might otherwise elude me for a long time. I suppose I could practice just listening, and learning to hear these things without the formal analytic clues, but honestly that listening seems to proceed so slowly for me. (Example: the radio played a clip of Ira Gershwin singing something from Porgy and Bess. The announcer warned that he was off-key at the beginning, but that the clip got better after the start. Well. Ha. I couldn't hear any off-keyness at all, it all sounded just fine to me.)

Beyond just phrase endings, but also internally within phrases, in listening to these Songs Without Words, I don't hear any obvious "this is a normal harmony, this is an unusual harmony" cues that I hear in the Clementi Sonatinas we were working with over on the Analysis thread. So I don't know what that's all about, but it means that I still want the formal harmonic analysis to match up with what I hear and try to figure out what harmonic effects Mendelssohn is using and what they sound like.

I mentioned that the harmonic analysis might tell me things about possible interpretation, but then again, maybe not. Here's another example: I was playing Gurlitt's Little Flower for my teacher last year, and she said "that sounds just like a little flower." Well. Ha. I hadn't been thinking about making it sound like a little flower at all. I'd been thinking purely technically about adding Romantic expression: big swells and diminuendos in the phrases, expressive rubato at the phrase ends, big forte's where indicated. And my impression after my exhaustive harmonic analysis of my Mendelssohn Song Without Words left me thinking that a similar thing is true here too: pay attention to the dynamics and other technical issues, and the harmonic effects will emerge all by themselves from the notes that Mendelssohn has chosen, without any need to emphasize them further. (The one exception where harmonic analysis might influence my interpretation would be finding the tension chord(s) just before a resolution, and hanging on them a bit longer. Or conversely, sinking deeply into the resolution itself. This is the kind of choice that I won't know until I can play the piece, albeit slowly, and can practice listening to the different choices. I can't audiate well enough to decide on these things just from reading the score away from the piano.)

This is different from for example Bach's Prelude in C where my dynamic interpretation is intimately linked to the harmonic analysis, emphasising the strange chords and relaxing on the plain chords. (I'm not sure if Richard would agree with this approach to expression in that Prelude, since when we analyzed it he had an entirely different way of understanding its structure.)

Specifically from doing harmonic analysis on Romantic pieces (Schubert over on the Analysis thread, Mendelssohn here), I am learning to expand my understanding of harmonic vocabulary beyond the Baroque and Classical harmony that is all I have studied before now. By going through note by note and chord by chord, I'm really absorbing some of the new things the Romantics are doing with chromaticism. I like knowing about these things, rather than just seeing a score and the composer's choices as a mass of notes with the only things I can say about them being "this is for colour" or "this is for effect". What I've seen so far in the composers I've studied, including Schubert and Mendelssohn, is that they choose their harmonies and chromatics according to very careful principles; they're not just a random set of notes set down any old way that happen to sound good. As I move forward in time beyond the early Romantics, I expect to start learning more and more about the ways that successive composers stretched the harmonic envelope step by step.

Book 1, op. 19b (1829–1830)
No. 1 Andante con moto in E major - Dipsy
No. 2 Andante espressivo in A minor - ragnhildK
No. 3 Molto allegro e vivace in A major - Evelyn S
No. 4 Moderato in A major - Devrie
No. 5 Poco agitato in F-sharp minor - Ganddalf
No. 6 Andante sostenuto in G minor - Recaredo

Book 2, op. 30 (1833–1834)
No. 1 Andante espressivo in E-flat major - Valencia
No. 2 Allegro di molto in B-flat minor
No. 3 Adagio non troppo in E major - PianoStudent88
No. 4 Agitato e con fuoco in B minor
No. 5 Andante grazioso in D major - Beric
No. 6 Allegretto tranquillo in F-sharp minor - LimeFriday

Book 3, op. 38 (1836–1837)
No. 1 Con moto in E-flat major
No. 2 Allegro non troppo in C minor - ROSSY
No. 3 Presto e molto vivace in E major
No. 4 Andante in A major -
No. 5 Agitato in A minor
No. 6 Andante con moto in A-flat major - Sam S

Book 4, op. 53 (1839–1841)
No. 1 Andante con moto in A-flat major - IreneAdler
No. 2 Allegro non troppo in E-flat major
No. 3 Presto agitato in G minor
No. 4 Adagio in F major - WiseBuff
No. 5 Allegro con fuoco in A minor
No. 6 Molto Allegro vivace in A major

Book 5, op. 62 (1842–1844)
No. 1 Andante espressivo in G major
No. 2 Allegro con fuoco in B-flat major
No. 3 Andante maestoso in E minor - ZRTF90
No. 4 Allegro con anima in G major
No. 5 Andante con moto in A minor
No. 6 Allegretto grazioso in A major

Book 6, op. 67 (1843–1845)
No. 1 Andante in E-flat major - timmyab
No. 2 Allegro leggiero in F-sharp minor - dire tonic
No. 3 Andante tranquillo in B-flat major
No. 4 Presto in C major
No. 5 Moderato in B minor - Pavel.K
No. 6 Allegro non troppo in E major

Book 7, op. 85 (1834–1845)
No. 1 Andante espressivo in F major
No. 2 Allegro agitato in A minor - Wayne33yrs
No. 3 Presto in E-flat major
No. 4 Andante sostenuto in D major - Rupak Bhattacharya
No. 5 Allegretto in A major
No. 6 Allegretto con moto in B-flat major

Book 8, op. 102 (1842–1845)
No. 1 Andante un poco agitato in E minor
No. 2 Adagio in D major - FarmGirl
No. 3 Presto in C major -
No. 4 Un poco agitato, ma andante in G minor - LadyChen
No. 5 Allegro vivace in A major
No. 6 Andante in C major - Greener

Yes I'm making headway but still find I need to leave out the lower F in measure 2 in order to maintain the melody in the right hand. I'll see my teacher tomorrow and she may have a better suggestion. I'm still working through the first page and the first four measures are the most difficult as far as fingering. Any suggestions are welcome.

Wayne is up to the end of bar 8 now, but it's still real slow, I don't know wether to continue to the next bar 9 and 10 tomorow, or take a break and work solely on these first 8 bars till they're perfectish?

If you've done to bar 8, Wayne, you have done up to bar 10! You've also got the technique for 10-14, 22-30 and 41-45 after you've accommodated those nasty subtle changes.

Personally I would drop these bars and let them assimilate for a while. Your attention should first be on 14-18, then 18-22, 30-34 and 34-41. I would spend a week on each of these sections in isolation then a fortnight to combine each pair taking you to the middle of January (assuming you continue over Christmas).

In middle to late Jan you can return to these simpler sections (you might use weekends to keep them in your head and use half-bar sections to work up some tempo).

By mid Feb you should be ready to think about joining these sections and control the tempo with a metronome. When you're free of hesitations at about 50-60 bpm for minims you should be able to let the tempo come up quite quickly to whatever feels comfortable for you (and keeps you mistake free).

There's absolutely no point letting mistakes in anywhere here just to have it ready in time for a recital. Get it right and use whatever tempo you're up to for the recital. No-one's going to be upset by a slower tempo but will you be happy recording errors?

Thanks Richard, You're the Man!

If we are to play these mid February my strategy is to have the whole thing under my fingers by mid January. That means a new measure every day attending to dynamics and fingering and hoping that the previous measures begin to feel comfortable (perfectish feels pretty out there right now). Then with the whole in my head I hope to smooth it out and get it ready for performance. I was up to six measures today but the first two are tough ones and not as beautiful as they could be.

Mid February is the ABF Recital. I don't think we'll clash with that so would allow at least another month to mid March before this goes ahead.

If it's any help, try dropping the RH accompaniment in the first measures and just play the LH with the RH melody and make it sound beautiful before adding the rest of the RH. It gives you something to aim for instead of hoping to hear it right. You might try it all the way up to measure 9. That's a beautiful melody.

We wouldn't dream of a coincidle Recital/video posting with Mr.S.H!

THAT is fabulous news. MOre time is better so I can relax and enjoy this piece. Whooohooo.

I have a question about my piece---op30 no1.

Does anyone know...is there a trick to using the pedal to make the passages legato? For now I'm focusing on the first part. Even just looking at bars 1 and 2. Both the left and right hand play triplets for accompaniment, and then the right hand also has to play the melody. The melody is played with my 5th finger RH, but it is marked legato. Initially I was trying to hold on to those melody notes with my pinky while I was playing the triplets with the rest of the fingers on my right hand, but it was causing pain in my hand so I have to use the pedal to do it. however i just can't seem to get it. Barenboim makes it sound so lovely and legato, but mine sounds either choppy or smudged.

Op.31/1 is a very hard piece. This is the case when played both at low and high speed. At several places you will have to play a two-against-three rythm with your right hand. And the general challenge is to bring out the melody along with the triplets of the two middle voices. I use quite rapid action with the pedal when I play this piece myself, but I have to admit that I have never been able to bring it up to a high artistic level.

Don’t injure yourself! Use sustain as liberally as needed but aim to use the suggested fingering. Often as not you’ll find a lot of it will fall under your fingers and give you your legato.

I’ve only looked at the first few bars but there are a couple of things to note. Heavy use of the pinky but also use 4 to enhance legato for example between Ab and Bb in bar 2.

Quite a bit of finger swapping going on in the melody (e.g. Eb in bar 3 and C in bar 4). Is the fingering marked in your score?

In bar 2, just after the Ab melody note, the RH G should be played by the LH together with the Bb. That's going to give the RH some vital independence. Is that marked in your score? If not I can point you to a better edition.

Looking at bar 2, I’m assuming your score indicates the top A in the LH chord should be played with the RH? I’d say my hands are a tad smaller than average but I can do a fingertip 10th with the LH, a fraction less with the RH. So in bar 2 I can take on the bass clef 10th chord entirely providing I omit the middle F. Also in the RH, I can just manage the fingertip 9th with B nat. at the top. Are either of those intervals within your reach? If so, you can juggle the responsibility for those extreme notes without losing too much of the richness in the harmony.

For the chord with the C melody – unless you can do the LH fingertip 10th - you’d have to drop the bottom F as you’ve already suggested but that’s fairly transient and not too big a sacrifice.

Hope that’s of use. I’d be very interested to know what your teacher suggests.