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How do any of you who play this manage some of the big chords - especially left hand (there's a couple there that are a thirteenth, I think)? I notice the notation says to roll some of them (the squiggly vertical line left of the notation...sorry for the highly technical description ), but my small hand with short fingers can barely reach an octave, so I roll it 5 3 1 out to get the top note with my thumb. Seems to work, on a recording I have of Jane Coop playing this, that same chord does sound rolled, but it's seamless - must be a massive hand to do this, or she voiced the chord into a cluster she could reach.

There's also some meaty right hand chords - especially the voiced Eb chords in the upper register later on in the piece that are also a challenge for smaller hands.

I tackled this piece because it's a favourite, short and pretty, & thus I thought would be easy - damn don't you hate it when good pianists make it look and sound so easy...but I'm daunted by the challenge this presents me. Any hints?

Jamie

Brahms is really tough on us folk with small hands. This is my method, in sort of descending order of preference:

1. Rework the chord so that some of the notes are being played by the other hand. So if the rh chord is middle C-E-G-C, see if the lh can play that middle C.

2. Roll the chord.

3. Drop a note out of the chord. This is painful because Brahms (or whoever) really *wanted* that note in the chord! With some composers :cough cough Rachmaninoff cough cough: you can probably drop a note here or there without anyone noticing, but Brahms... I dunno. He's such a master of harmony, IMHO.

BTW, you're right that the squiggly line means to roll the chord, and Brahms does it a lot in this piece, thank heavens!

Nina,

I didn't want to drop any notes.

A) it's whimping out, and
B) it doesn't sound right to just drop any I can't reach.

I think the answer is to roll them, and try to get it as seamless as possible. That's alot harder for those big right hand chords, though, because you need to keep the melody going as well. Tks for the encouagement - nice to know I'm not the only one here without "piano" hands.

Jamie

Jamie :

This is one of those pieces whose apparent "ease" of execution is really quite deceptive. The biggest challenge in this piece is, I feel, carrying the melody "seamlessly" - as you put it - regardless of whether, at a given moment, that melody is a single note or the top note of a chord. For example, in bar 10: the first melody note - the Eb - is the top note of a 5-note chord, the second and third notes, the top note of a 3-note chord and finally, the last half beat of the bar is a single note.

What you hear (poor) amateurs play is a series of poorly connected chords; the more notes to the chord the louder they make the chord sound. This, of course, is not what Brahms wants; the chords, no matter many notes comprise them, are just the harmony to support the melody, and that melody must be smooth and relaxed, an integral part of the phrase in which it is found. No chord should stand out against any other except in the overall dynamics of the rising and falling of the phrase.

For this reason, it is a good practice technique to play through this several times playing just the melody and shaping that melody as evenly as possible. Then, adding the understructure you should have no change in the dynamics of the melody, just a change in the harmonic under-pinnings. To do this successfully, it often helps to concentrate the weight of the hand/arm on the outside of the hand, so that the melody notes get the most "weight" and the accompanying notes of the chord less weight.

As for the arpeggiated or "rolled" chords: in the Henle Urtext, all the chords on the second and third beats of the LH in bars 1 through 6 are broken chords (bottom to top) as is the last chord of bar 7. In bars 8 through 15, the LH chords are solid. Bars 15 through 20 are (essentially) the same as bars 1 through 6. The only other places where the LH chords are broken are in bars 33 and 34.

This has always been one of my favorites of the Brahms Op 39.

Regards,

P.S.

Be careful also of the phrasing in this waltz. There are many two and three-note phrases which should be scrupulously observed.

Regards,

Bruce - that was excellent.. You sound like a real stickler