Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Schulz evler arabeske on the blue danube

I am playing this transcription and am progressing reasonably well actually, apart from bar 5 where I have absolutely no idea how to finger it, imslp link here: http://imslp.org/wiki/Arabesken_%C3%BCber_%27An_der_sch%C3%B6nen_blauen_Donau%27_von_Johann_Strauss_%28Schulz-Evler,_Adolf%29 any suggestions welcome
thanks in advance

I'll help you out. But first you have to help us a little better to help you out!

What fingering(s) do you think of? What fingering(s) have you tried? I'm assuming that anyone who's able to even think of playing this piece would have some ideas. So yeah, I'm assuming you don't mean it literally that you have no idea. In fact, I know that someone able to play the piece at all would have some ideas.

How about telling us what you've thought of and tried, and what you don't like about them. Then we can answer you better.

BTW, I've played the piece and I usually just left out that whole intro except the very end.
That's what Josef Lhevinne did in his great recording of the piece. In his piano roll (as opposed to the real recording) he plays the whole thing (except for a part in the middle that he leaves out on both of them -- wisely IMO).

PW's member Jeffrey Biegel has a recording of this on Youtube which can stand up against any I have heard. I've said before, and will say again : ease and fluency with just the right touch of Viennese schmaltz!

Biegel plays Schulz-Evler "Concert Arabesques"

Regards,

Thanks BruceD--that's quite a compliment--and accepted! Although I have recorded the 'Blue Danube' for PianoDisc, and it is also on my 1997 internet recital cd, cyberecital.com, it had to be on this new Steinway & Sons release. Hope everyone at PW will have a chance to enjoy the new recording. (A Grand Romance)

I have tried many, my favorite being sliding from the A to the G with finger 4, or starting on the finger 2 and moving over, another solution is cheating as Earl Wild seems to and play a B natural, and by the way, Jeffery I really enjoy your playing just listening through it.

Thanks so much!!

Jeffrey: I echo the above, and great to see you as always!


Im@me, indeed that's tricky, but really the whole intro is tricky and I don't see that this is any trickier than the rest. Also I don't think B-natural makes it any easier, and if Wild played it that way, I think we can be quite sure it was either a musical choice or a mistake of reading, not something to make it easier.

Anyway....there are two fingerings marked in my edition (Carl Fischer). The main one is just the most straightforward fingering:
124345 432432

It also suggests:
124313 213432 -- and that's what I used, when I played the intro at all, which, as I said, I usually didn't, and not just because it's so hard.

Did you not think of these fingerings? (Neither one is that terribly out of the way.)
If you just considered them not doable, why not?


BTW, Lhevinne, besides leaving out almost the whole intro on that recording and also leaving out one of the themes, also shortens the "poco a poco crescendo" section of the coda, which to me is a huge improvement. (Or, as Huneker or somebody said about shortening the recap of Chopin's 1st Scherzo, "the gainer thereby." That always struck me as a nice and useful phrase, although I've never seen it elsewhere, before or since.)
As Schulz-Evler has that passage, IMO it's a near-ridiculous PDQ-Bach-ish endless sequence. (Jeffrey, apologies to you -- I see that you play it as written.) Lhevinne cuts more to the chase, and to me it works great.

I read somewhere that Lhevinne decided, undoubtedly between the time of his piano roll and his Victor recording, that the introduction was old-fashioned, which is why he left it off the latter recording.