To paraphrase John Donne, no pianist is an island. Using one of the more versatile of Western instruments, this musician sits in front of a wide range of tonal possibilities — and also faces a bewildering array of choices that are not always about the piano itself.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Yesterday I wrote in my review of Paul Lewis’s Schubert sonata recital how much of the music requires a singing voice. It’s the same with the music of Mozart.
With these two composers and any others writing monody (melody with accompaniment), the pianist it at once singer and accompanist, needing to play as if breathing between phrases.
But this sort of thinking doesn’t work with contrapuntal music, where two or more voices are present at the same time. Here balance and rhythm and harmony work together in many different ways, depending on the period in which the music was written.
Composers left increasingly detailed instructions on interpretation starting in the 19th century. But what to do with J.S. Bach, who left his keyboard interpreters with very few clues about how to play the music?
That’s why we hear so many different types of interpretations, regardless of the sort of keyboard instrument being used.
Vancouver-based pianist Svetlana Ponomarëva replied to one of my earlier posts with a link to an instructional video she has created as a companion to a Bach teaching manual. In her approach, she suggests the keyboard player should follow the articulation of a Baroque violinist to make the music sound right.
Hearing Ponomarëva explain it, this suggestion makes an awful lot of sense. The results she gets at the piano are at once clean, crisp and very musical.
So, for Bach as well as any other composer of the time writing counterpoint, the modern pianist becomes a string ensemble, her fingers tracing the attack of bow hairs on a string.
Here are Ponomarëva’s two short video presentations, followed by her playing Bach’s fifth French Suite. (I need to add that I’m not endorsing what the pianist says on the two videos, except for the actual practice of translating violin bowing to keyboard articulation):
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
