Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Just how good are the people that play ridiculously hard modern works?

My wife and I saw a fairly well known pianist play some works by Finnesy last year - including the incredibly difficult Alkan a Paganini. He then went on to play ordinary Alkan extrememly well and also some very hard Liszt transcriptions, all superbly.

Someone with good reading skills


John

Why should they memorize the music?

Liszt and Clara Schumann were among the first virtuosos to spread this "commandment" of always playing from memory, and there's a theory that they only did it to impress the audiences (and because it impressed audiences, other soloists wanted to do it, too).

There are, of course, a few problems with playing from memory: memory blocks; forgetting certain indications in the score; unknowingly adding certain other indications that are not in the score; memorizing wrong notes/rhythms; another reason for stage anxiety...

On the other hand, if you memorize the music, then you don't have to worry about turning pages (which isn't an issue if you have a page turner, either) and it impresses the audience that you can play from memory (though today it doesn't really impress so much anymore, as much as it is simply deemed necessary).

I was just asking half in jest as for orchestral musicians it's not a factor. You're right, there would be an awful lot to remember. I confess I'm a terrible sightreader and what I have used from sheet music I've had to memorize a measure at a time.
On a related note though, I took a music theory course at our local college and I was amazed that some people didn't understand music despite sightreading and playing for years. These people only seemed to play from rote. Taking away their sheet music they were totally lost. How can this be? Some of these were even studying to be music majors.

Oh come off it, I just woke up when I wrote that.

With some of the ultra modern difficult and dissonant compositions, the pianist can relax when playing, as only a very few in the audience will know whether or not a wrong note was struck. Gaby Tu

Conversely, only a very few in the audience will know whether a correct note was struck!

:p

With regard to memorizing contemporary pieces: I've talked to 2 performing pianists about this. They said that most players of contemporary music don't bother to memorize it because of its difficulty. The difficulty they are talking about is not necessarily that the music is technically harder but that the structure is less apparent. This is one reason why some teachers don't have younger, less experienced players learn Brahms or Debussy; it's not necessarily a matter of technical difficulty, but the harmonic structure being more complex and less easy to discern. It's possible that as younger musicians learn more contemporary music and it becomes familiar, these types of structures will also be easier to memorize.

I assume that ensemble pieces (even piano duets) are played with music, because the musicians are not expected to remember the other parts that cue them. Or if another musician screws up, a score will help everything come right again.

There are audiences for this kind of music? Why pay good money when you cannot tell the difference between right or wrong notes?

Ahem...

This thread was written under the supposition that the pianist was going to give an accurate and good performance of the music. I would argue that modern piano music is the hardest, bar none, to read, memorize, play with all the correct dynamics, be technically accurate, and be able to bring out emotions in. I just can't see any other genre being more difficult. A glance at Xenakis's "Mists" and Sorabji's "Opus Clavicembalisticum" should provide fairly solid evidence that this music is just barely within human grasp, and that's only technically. In order to bring out the surreal emotions of it, all the different voices, and play it well, that's another task entirely.

Well, after reading carefully through the links to those scors I have only one thing to say:

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I think I have just been driven insane just by looking at it! If you can make sense of it and play it with any sort of proficiency, much less memorize it, you deserve accolades.