Ravel on You Tube

I've been watching, or listening to, a number of You Tube videos of classical music performances over the last couple of weeks. Sometimes I've just listened while I'm doing something else on the computer; other times I've sat and watched the video, distracted from doing anything else altogether. 

I hadn't realised just how much music was available for one thing, though I'd known that just about any piece of music you wanted to hear, or see performed, can be found on You Tube these days. Which is extraordinary in itself. 

Tonight I've just watched a performance of Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. It was played by Hélène Tysman with the Orchestra of the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar under Professor Nicolás Pasquet. 

Tysman gives a stunning performance, all the more so because concertos for the left hand are notoriously difficult, requiring the pianist to balance their body in a way that's quite different to normal, keeping an intense focus on just one hand, the very hand that in many pianists is slightly weaker than the other. The pianist is required to play, in this concerto anyway, right up to the upper register of the keyboard, which means leaning far to the right, maintaining the balance, and working across the body at the same time. It’s an achievement and a half to do it.

And there are some extremely difficult things to do in this piece: rapid octave passages, great thundering bass notes hit from a distance, intricate fast moving sections that have to be entirely encompassed under one hand. It's not a piece I'll be tackling any time soon...

I always wonder what a pianist practicing such a piece does with the right hand. There are no concertos purely for the right hand, so they can’t learn two different concertos at once, and obviously a professional pianist can’t let the right hand languish for weeks while the left hand does all the work. I’d be interested to know.

There’s an interesting comment part the way down the page relating to the video: Can people not look like they're bored during the entire performance! This is honestly an impeccable performance. I would be in awe if I got to play in an orchestra next to her. [I've corrected several errors in this comment for readability.]

The person commenting isn’t talking about the audience, but about the orchestral musicians. I personally didn’t think they look bored, although there seemed to be some odd grins and facial expressions at times, as though one or two were giving a nod to musicians in other parts of the orchestra. This isn’t entirely professional, but I guess these are students, so they might be given some leeway.

The young men’s dress sense could have been smartened up, however: several of them have their collars undone and their ties hanging loose. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but I’m sure once they join a full-time orchestra such things won’t be allowed.

However, one more word on the boredom factor. I remember going to see New Zealand’s own Symphony Orchestra last year, and was quite surprised, as we waited for the concert to start, to see the violinists, who were the ones I could see most clearly, sitting there with faces that could have expressed anything from ‘not this piece again’ to ‘what an unpleasant-looking audience; I wonder if they have a musical bone between them.’

I don’t say that that’s what they were thinking, but they seemed very unfriendly, somehow. And at the end of the concert this same expression came over them, in spite of tumultuous applause. Curious.

La cathédrale engloutie

La cathédrale engloutie is a piano piece by Claude Debussy, one of the twelve Preludes he published in 1910.  I've played it since I was a teenager, and always enjoyed the way the deep bass notes resonate underneath notes in the higher registers, as well as the way the huge chords build up in the climax.  I remember it being performed in Dunedin's Concert Chamber (as it was known then) by a touring New Zealand female pianist - her name escapes me, but she was well known.  In the middle of the piece (almost literally in the middle) she had a momentary mental block, and stopped. Fortunately she was able to carry on quickly and only those who knew the piece would have noticed.  But she must have been disappointed; the momentary break caused a much bigger emotive break. 

So, La cathédrale engloutie is a piano piece, and it was written for the piano, and sounds very good on the piano.  I have no objections to musicians and composers transcribing well-known piano pieces for other instruments, or for orchestras, but sometimes only the original instrument conveys the composer's intentions satisfactorily.  (Occasionally it works the other way: Ravel's orchestration of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is probably superior in almost every way to the original piano version.  The piano version is marvellous, and exhilarating to play, but a full orchestra has the capacity to give depth and breadth and variety to the music in a way few pianists can.)  

However, just this week I've heard two other instruments playing La cathédrale engloutie, one a guitar, and the other - just this morning - a harp.  Nope, this piece doesn't work on either of those instruments: the sonority of the piano is totally missing, the ability to sustain notes with the pedal while others are being played is totally missing, the wondrous booming bass pedal note that thunders through the piece again and again cannot be achieved on either a guitar or a harp.  I could barely hear this bass note in the harp version - there was a kind of clonk somewhere in the depths every so often - and while the guitar achieved the effect a little better, I would guess it was at the expense of shifting the registers of the original music around.  

I suppose it must be disappointing if you're a harpist or a guitarist not to be able to play all music written for the piano.  It sounds like an easy process of transcription really - all three instruments have a fair number of notes at their disposal; all three can play chords comfortably.  But sometimes you harpist or you guitarist just have to admit there are certain pieces that will sound worse if tackled on your instrument.  Please refrain from playing those.

I wrote some piano pieces early last year - after I'd finished writing the music for Grimhilda!.  Not one of these four pieces would sound effective on a guitar or a harp. They rely on the particular percussiveness of the piano, the ability to wash the notes together with the sustaining pedal, and the wide tonal range that the piano has.  I'm going to keep them hidden from any guitarists or harpists I meet...

Open-air sheet music

Couldn't resist putting this photo on here, after my comments about sheet music in the last post.


It looks like something that's been photoshopped, but apparently it's for real. (It was taken by 'Tape') It's in Minneapolis, on the former Schmitt Music Building. Another Flickr.com photographer (I think they go under the pseudonym of O So Lazy Susan) has a heap of pictures of it from different angles. This photographer notes:
This musical mural is believed to be sheet music from a portion of Maurice Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. I heard there was some major copyright issues once upon a time, but that is just a rumour. Schmitt Music used to be housed in the building. The music store is gone, but the mural remains.

I'm glad people are photographing this, because it's just the sort of thing some demolition person would come along and destroy in a matter of moments.