Phew. This one is touuuugh. I urge you to go find a recording of someone competent playing this song, and then listen to the following recording. I'm going super super slowly, and *still* missing tons of notes. Here's my first thought on why it's so hard. There will be other thoughts, no doubt.
Much of the piece is 8ths vs 16ths. And there are normal scale patterns that usually show up in 16th note runs like this; normal in the sense of whether the bottom or top note of a run is on the beat or on the off beat. Bach does both, seemingly randomly. This is a piece where it's very hard to hear the throughline when you're playing it slowly. There's a nice ringing melody that comes through in the Feltsman recording that I can't even find on the page yet. I've been here before, notably with that fantasie-impromptu I mentioned some days ago, but it's a tough place to be. You practice the notes mechanically until you can play it fast enough to start picking out the melody.
The difference here, the new part, is that in the fantasie impromptu, many of those difficult parts are essentially arpeggios - the notes of a chord played in some order, but still basically a chord. That's not what this is; this is a canon. That means there are several voices intervweaving throughout, which is really different to play. This is gonna take a while, so let's get comfortable together. I recommend tea.
No comments:
Post a Comment