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Leaving out repeats is a lower level crime than changing or redistributing notes (which I would NEVER do, unless it was absolutely necessary) and I think there can be no objection. After all, we're not even leaving out the exposition repeat, just the long, weird one.

I think how we order the crimes is a matter of personal taste. For me, redistributing notes is a minor crime, because it doesn't alter which pitches are played when. While ignoring a repeat in Beethoven-- Beethoven, who thought a lot about things like structural cohesion and overall balance-- is a major crime indeed. Nonetheless, I do it with these particular repeats.


-Jason

Pardon the 'correction.'


(Provided that neither the music nor the musical effect is compromised.
Like, I doubt I'd ever feel that cheating the opening of the Hammerklavier is OK -- not because of violating the indicated distribution per se but because the music suffers.)

That's a slippery slope-- especially to those who say that certain hard passages are "supposed" to sound hard, and redistributing them can have the negative musical effect of making them sound too easy. We can argue whether that's really a "musical" effect, but in some cases it is.

For instance, the famous broken octaves of op.2/2. Most people follow Czerny and use two hands; Beethoven not only wrote it for one hand, he gave a fingering for it. Charles Rosen says: "The difficulty of playing the passage with one hand reveals itself audibly in performance even on one of Beethoven's pianos with its narrower keys. The effect of the performer's having to struggle even slightly with the passage gives it psychologically greater force with the public."

-Jason


p.s. But I basically agree with you.

Indeed! Life is full of them, and it's up to us to decide where the lines are.


Can't argue with that.

BTW I'm totally with that quote about the broken octaves.

One can double the the opening low B-flats an octave lower, especially as the music was written out for pianos that only go down to the C above the lowest B-flat . . . about repeats, wouldn't the repeat in the first movement of Chopin's Op. 58 sonata be much more demanding to execute than the repeats in the early Beethoven sonatas?

I think that would be one repeat performers would be much more tempted to avoid!


M.

People can be so precious when it comes to Mozart, in particular.

Well about Horowitz: I can understand how his playing of Beethoven and Mozart should not be a role model to younger pianists, but at the same time I find that it's my little guilty pleasure to listen to his recordings of such works!

On the question at hand: I'm currently working with a Canadian composer who has a couple of repeats on her works. From the manuscript, she has a phrase like "repeat mandatory" or something like that.

So my very first thing was to eliminate that, thinking that when you have a repeat with 1 and 2 different endings, etc (not sure how it's called in English) then it's pretty obvious that you have to do it. Because you need to play it twice, in order to get a lead/bridge to the next part. This is what the composer wanted. And thus I deleted that phrase.

The composer came back to me within minutes saying that she wants the comment back! I thought "what on earth?!?!" but she went to great lengths to explain how in Canada (and the US) because of time restrictions, pretty much NO repeat is being followed! So I gave in and the comment is there!

But in all honesty I think that I tend to follow the repeats. This is what they're there for. :-/ Perhaps we're not used to a certain repeat, or perhaps there's no time (exams), but other than that this is what the text says. And it's something absolute: you either do it, or you don't!

"first ending" and "second ending"


Actually, as can be seen from this thread, there are pieces by the "great composers" with repeats that many people don't take even though 1st and 2nd endings are written in the score. (They just omit the 1st ending and skip to the 2nd ending, which then serves as the "bridge.") And I'm pretty sure it's not just a geographic thing (i.e. America vs. Europe or whatever) to view it this way; the presence of repeat signs, even with 1st and 2nd endings written in the score, is sometimes taken as just a nod to formality rather than an absolute order to play the repeat. I can well understand why she objected to your deleting the order to take the repeat -- because otherwise it wouldn't automatically be understood to be so.

MICHAEL:


I don't think so -- not from that standpoint. It seems you're talking about repeating the Chopin being a physical challenge, or maybe an endurance thing, and I don't see it that way at all. I also doubt that this would be a significant consideration for anyone else who plays the piece seriously.

Exactly! I was trained to at least do the repeat if there's a first and a second ending! She wasn't! She was trained to do the opposite: Avoid it at all cost to save us time!

I don't understand this time limit issue in regard to the repeats. Isn't it standard everywhere that a recital is organized for a fixed duration, then the music is selected which fits into that time space?

So a 2hr performance (1 hr. 45 minutes of music, 15 min. intermission) might have a sonata on it.

But with a 1hr performance if a work seems to take up too much of the available time, wouldn't it just be omitted rather than truncated?

This is the first I've heard of cutting out repeats in a performance for that reason, though with recordings it happens for that reason . . . (even though for a recording one can plan out the music appropriately as well . . . recordings are so fabricated now I think one needs to hear a performer in person, likely the repeat if included would just be a re-spliced in copy of what preceded it rather than being played separately and a bit differently!).


M.

About fabrication, I know of a pianist who recorded the entire Chopin preludes mostly one bar at a time, then all was digitally edited to fit together uniformly . . . I'm not going to say who the pianist is though!


M.

Who said anything like that? I didn't notice it.

I don't think it's common for repeats to be omitted for that reason -- not in recitals anyway. But something that does happen a fair amount, which I suppose could be wrongly lumped together with that: We might just feel that a piece is too long for its own good with all the repeats and that it's more effective if we leave out some or all of them. Sometimes this really is mostly a time consideration per se -- like, "this piece is great if it's 15 minutes long but not so good if it's 22 minutes"; or sometimes it's not thought of with regard specifically to timing but it amounts to the same.

I can see how either of these things could get mixed up with "it didn't fit into the time allowed for the program" -- but they aren't really that.

Competitions are a totally different story. In those, indeed it's not uncommon for repeats to be omitted so that a piece will fit into the time limit of a round. But the players have to be careful for it not to be ridiculous or they'll pay a price.

Nikolas wrote that according to the Canadian composer, in the U.S. and Canada the repeats are omitted for reasons of time restrictions . . . but I think formats are the same everywhere for piano recitals as with 2 hrs. for full length which is 1:45 or 1:50 of music and a 15 or 10 min. intermission - most venues will not pay a piano soloist to do anything less than that, I've always been told in the U.S. that it must be at least two hours with a minimum 1:45 of music . . . that was years ago so maybe things have changed . . . what are these pianists doing, 10 minute recitals with one minute intermissions?


M.

My teacher generally hates repeats. I've heard it said (somewhere in these forums, perhaps) that in conservatory classes and even conservatory recitals, there's a collective sigh of relief when the sonata exposition repeat is not taken. I have to confess that in my teacher's monthly masterclasses, I've started to participate in that sigh.

That didn't stop me from playing Chopin's first scherzo for the class with all its repeats intact. My teacher told the class-- in a friendly enough way-- that my performance convinced her once and for all that that piece needs to have some of its repeats removed. Not what I wanted to hear! (Though she liked the performance generally.)

One girl, influenced by this studio's anti-repeat culture, even played all of Schumann's Papillons without a single repeat. That... didn't work.


-Jason

Oh OK -- sorry!

I don't think that's true.
At least not to any significant extent, and absolutely not to the extent that she seems to have said.


I can see why it didn't.
And very similarly: At one of the amateur competitions a terrific player did the Brahms-Handel Variations without any of the repeats. That didn't go over too well either.

So then the conservatory teachers see that there can be limitations with an overly-literal approach to music . . . rather than have the repeats interpreted differently they prefer the omission of the repeats (even though the repeats are in the score!) . . .


M.

Claudio Arrau (in my opinion the greatest 20th Century interpreter of Beethoven's piano sonatas) was interviewed at length about performing them. At one point the interviewer asked him : 'When do you play or omit repeats in Beethoven's Sonatas?'
Arrau's reply was prompt and unequivocal: 'In Beethoven you ALWAYS play the repeats.'
In his recording of the complete Sonatas the performance and recording are 'COMPLETE'. Nothing is left out.
It is my view that performances with a repeat omitted here and there or omitted altogether are unsatisfactory musically and philosophically.
Beethoven knew what he wanted and what he was doing. Every repeat in a sonata is part of the work's construction and any omission unbalances the structure and weakens the emotional impact. There is room for variation in Beethoven performances but the variation does not extend to destroying the structure and artistry of his creations.

rk

I meant in exams, rather than recitals. Sorry for the mixup!

I think competitions ban repeats due to time constraints. I've never heard a Beethoven Sonata performed in a professional recital without the repeat.