awadablog

Beethoven Piano Concerto #4 in conclusion.... ( sort of)!

Beethoven 4th Continued

Glossary

I'd thought I'd share a glossary of some of the terms used for those that may not be familiar:

TONIC: The main key of a piece

DOMINANT:  The V chord. It's typically the chord right before the last one of a piece. So in "Happy Birthday" , it's the final "to" of " to you". In the "Star Spangled Banner" it would be "the" of " the brave"

Usually as you can tell, it's on a "T" letter.....

 just kidding.

 

EXPOSITION: In what's called sonata form, which is essentially that of a concerto, the exposition is the opening set of materials/melodies/motives that make up the movement; often with the exception of the opening theme, in the DOMINANT. There follows the:

DEVELOPMENT:  where said materials/melodies/motives, get treated in different keys, expanded, contracted, any number of devices applied to them, culminating in a usually triumphant return to the:

RECAPITULATION: The return of the original materials in their original form, and usually in the TONIC.

CADENZA: A section of the piece, usually after the conclusion of the RECAPITULATION where the soloist goes off on their own in a ( now a mostly) written exploration and further expansion of the materials. It has an improvisatory character, and generally quite virtuosic as well.

DOUBLE FORTE:( fortissimo) FF, very loud

PIANISSIMO: pp, very soft

I didn't mention the following perhaps in the talks but these terms come from forte and piano meaning loud and soft respectively.

I'm Fired Up about.....

greetings. look for my new video posts, on what I'm Fired Up about.
Could be the next performances, teaching, meals, wines, anything at all!
this first is the Beta, unscripted, poorly lit, badly edited, trial run discussion about the 4th Concerto of Beethoven that I'm playing this weekend in Cape Cod. Unfortunately i can't force the order of posts here on typepad, so please go from this one to 'continued' to 'conclusion!~" 

definition of a recording nightmare.....
person A has repeated trouble with a passage that person B has no problem with.
person A finally gets it right, and person B really messes up....
That's a huge FAIL....
No Fails today.....
Yeah Brahms...

Finally...

It's finally happening. Back to the studio to record Brahms Cello Sonatas, and Sonatensatz and Songs with my frequent chamber partner Zuill Bailey. We're up at Oberlin College, recording for Telarc, with our grammy award winning dream team of engineer Bruce Leek, and Producer Elaine Martone and we start today... This has been a project we've long talked about and its great that it's coming to fruition. Today was a day full of photos taken by Lisa Marie Mazzucco, and final piano decision.... So it's been incredibly rich to have been practicing these sonatas for the past month, full of new discoveries. The work of recording is so unlike a performance in that not only does the whole of a piece have to be a gem, any moment, any second, split second that a listener wants to examine must as well be a gem, all facets revealed; so the practicing for such an endeavor is absolutely microscopic. Interestingly of course, Zuill has also spent a month working and we came together the last several days in Cincinnati, and both of us had the experience that certain things we had worked on and perfected in our individual cocoons, were absolutely useless together. That said, without jinxing anything, our work has gone well, and we're very much looking forward to it. I have a couple of other recording projects coming up, and I'll fill you in on those in the coming days. Also note the redesign of the website which is wonderful... and again,, i'll try to be more regular here, and look for some interesting video content in the next couple weeks as concerts start up again... all best ap