Learning the Chopin Piano Trio -- Part I

The third class of the Solo and Collaborative course that I signed up for at the Juilliard Evening division.  Since the previous week I kind of injured myself, this week I thought I'd do a better job preparing.

My plan was to play through the 1st movement of the Chopin Trio in g minor.  So I starting practicing the piece in earnest last Thursday.  It became quite obvious that the piece is a bit more difficult than I had previously imagined.  There aren't clusters notes anywhere, but the piece does require some practice.  More practice than I had intended for this chamber music piece--I guess I wasn't giving it enough respect.  I suppose my Caltech habit of going to rehearsals and basically sightread things isn't gonna work too well here, because I actually need to play this piece well.  

So, practice it is.  Getting all the notes right is hard!  I guess it's been a while since I actually need to learn a piece the proper way.  So one week turns out not to be enough for the 1st movement.  Well, that's alright.  I'll play the 1st movement, or at least parts of it in class, and my readily available backup piece: Paganini-Liszt Etude #4.  I've been stuck on the Paganini-Liszt piece for a couple of months now, both technically and musically.  So it's a good piece for a masterclass-like setting.

On to the lesson we go.  And I learned a few very valuable lessons.

1) It's a bad idea to not to think musically when you're practicing.  John Hsu, the conductor when I was at Cornell, wondered out loud why so many pianists aren't practicing musically the same time they're practicing the notes.  He's a cellist, so I guess he's more musical.  I've been doing it, but when I gave myself this goal of learn the notes within a week, I forgot to think about the music.  Julie Jordan, the instructor for the class, wasn't too happy about my playthrough, which was exactly that--a playthrough.

2) Phrasing is extraordinarily important.  Dr. Jordan stressed this in both of my pieces.  Even for chords, there is some phrasing involved.  The notes need to go somewhere, and often times, if you don't have an intuitive feel, you can analyse the harmony, the meter and the rhythm to get an idea.  Simple example: 

From Chopin's Trio, bar 9 to bar 12.  The key signature is 2 flats.  The whole left hand line needs to be phrased.  The F♯ leading note goes to tonic G.  Phrase it that way.  

Even a scale, an arpeggio, a broken chord should be considered a musical idea.  Dr. Jordan mentions that she's not even used to playing scales without "going" anywhere.  For a broken chord, like the one in Chopin's Piano Trio measure 4:

The key signature is 2 flats.  You should feel like it goes to the top A.  Now, the PWM edition actually recommends not playing the broken chord in the right hand to sound more convincing (possibly Chopin's intent, since it occurs later in the piece), which Dr. Jordan concurred.  So the broken chord starts in the left hand and goes to now-non-broken chord in the right hand.  

Without keeping phrasing in mind, music sounds dead.  Personally, I think that piano is a limited instrument when it comes to phrasing; but if you don't even try, it just sounds really, really bad.  And the thing is, and this is a recent discovery of mine, the human ear picks up on very small nuances, and that the context in which we perceive sound matters a huge deal.  And that's the only reason why we can hear different colors coming from the piano, a supposedly percussive instrument.  I need to figure out exactly what the ear and the brain is actually capable of picking up.

3) Melody line.  Chopin listened and thoroughly enjoyed opera, even if he never wrote one.  He constantly thought about ways to make the piano sing.  It is no coincidence that Chopin became the greatest piano composer.


Paying attention to the melody line is similar to phrasing.  Bar 17-18 of the Chopin Trio 1st movement:

Make sure to use the circled notes to lead the syncopated melody while making the piano sing.  Even for something like this, from the 3rd to last measure of the Paganini-Liszt Etude #4:

It's a melody!  Not particularly interesting, but even less interesting if you just bang out those 4 notes.  In fact, if you go to youtube and listen to this piece, many performers didn't pay enough attention to these 4 innocent looking notes, and ended up sounding downright aggressive.  Yes, it's a showpiece, but you can still make music out of it.

4) The idea of the block.  By that, I mean the reduction (right word?) of the notes to a chord.  Like: 

Bar 53 of the trio 1st movement.  The key signature is 2 flats.  While I played the triplets well, the bottom quarter note I didn't pay much attention to, and thus sounded dead.  Dr. Jordan said that you should think of the triplets going to the bottom note (which is easier said than done because of the leap).  To assist in hearing and absorbing the sound, practice playing the top 3 notes as a chord lasting a quarter note and phrase that chord with the bottom note.  Dr. Julie calls this blocking.  It is easily applied elsewhere.  Basically you can practice "blocking" the entire Paganini-Etude to get a better feel.


This post has gone on long enough.  I'll leave some thoughts for another day.