Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Themed recital - the BIG ONE!

Thanks Dire tonic...my teacher feels I wouldn't lose much to leave out the top A (bass clef) in the left hand and just let the right hand play the melody notes. So the left hand would be the F chord.

Thank you dire tonic for the fingering suggestions! It helps, and no my score was not marked like that. I practiced it that way today and it sounded much better (using the fourth finger on the Ab and then using the LH only on the triplets in that particular spot). Perhaps there are other places in the score where I can use the LH where I was trying to use the right. I wonder if it is ok to play the triplets not so much legato but in a shorter fashion?

Ganddalf, I agree this is a challenging piece! I won't get it to any high artistic level either before this recital, or possibly ever. but I'll do the best I can. Some places where the RH plays the melody and the triplets, it is challenging to bring out the melody note while keeping the other softer. With the 2 against 3, I had started studying Debussy's First Arabesque just before I picked up this piece, so I think that helped me a lot with it. I don't think my use of the pedal is as rapid as it could/should be yet, because I haven't been sure how to do that and maintain the legato in a way that also doesn't hurt my hands. It seems alternative fingering though will help a lot so I'll continue to sort that out.

Lots of good advice from dire tonic on op 30 no. 1. Picking up some RH notes with LH (& vice versa) is needed here. And absolutely, don't try to hold onto anything that feels uncomfortable.

But, I don't see need for finger swaps in mm 3-4. I play 5 on the Eb, 2 on the C (followed by 1 on the F).

I'd be curious to know the better edition. I have comfortable fingerings, but only because my excellent teacher pointed them out.

Of those editions I’ve briefly checked, this is my preferred.

http://conquest.imslp.info/files/im...Y1802.16376.2106-39087018809139score.pdf

Nice potted history at the top and more detail than I’d seen before; metronome markings, notes on form and to my mind a little more convincing on fingering although they correspond a lot of the time.

This:-
http://erato.uvt.nl/files/imglnks/usimg/0/0c/IMSLP59573-PMLP05355-Combined.pdf

- has a lot in common but sometimes there’s an alternative.
In fact it was this latter I looked at first when pondering Valencia’s impossible stretch. Here it’s bracketed but in the Ditson edition the G is written on the correct stave.

jdw, I agree, these swaps are not always necessary or even advantageous but I usually experiment with them to see if they might help. Your fingering works fine for me, those particular swaps seem fussy. I’ve not looked at the others.

Fortunately we’re not delivering this recital till early spring so for trouble spots we can afford to spend a little time looking at alternatives, maybe devising our own, giving each of them a chance to bed in, or not.

Wayne, if you’re reading this, when I was practising the 85,2 you’ve now taken over, I found the 3,5 finger swap at the beginning of bar 3 to be a better alternative at speed than jumping straight to 5. Check out the Ditson if you're not already using it.

Yep I'm here I've just been making the fingering up as I go along so to speak, as long as it's comfortable and the next notes are easy to get to, I thought that should be ok. If I get time, I'll record a vid later and show you what I'm doing, then you could point out any improvements I could make. Cheers everyone

There's still empty seats, I hope others are going to join in Come on you lurkers, pick a piece, it's fun and a learning experience rolled into one Not to mention the sense of acheivement when the recital gets posted up

Dire tonic, thanks for posting those links. It will be interesting to compare with my edition (I have the Alfred masterworks).

I'm still lurking as I haven't got recording figured out, among other reasons. It's a nice project, though!

I couldn't video and play at the same time lol, so I wrote my chosen fingering on the score. What do you guys think?

It’s ok up to a point, fairly logical. The upper line of the RH (excluding the intermediate answering notes) should be legato and you’ll compromise that to some extent where you have F down to D (5,5), C to B (4,4) and E to C (5,5). Also it depends on the tempo. At medium to slow there may not appear to be much difference between ‘good’ and ‘better’ fingering – it might only become apparent at a faster tempo. You’ve got bigger hands than me if you’re happy going from B up to E with 4,5 although Ditson uses that. I used 3,5.

The LH is broadly ok but then it’s not working nearly as hard.

I would recommend spending at least an hour persevering with the ditson fingering on the RH alone - just those 4 bars - and seeing what you think. If you’ve not done finger swaps before it’ll seem a bit weird but when you get used to it it’s like a glide – quite satisfying.

I take that upper E as starting a new phrase, as does Ditson, so the break in legato should help.

I do agree though that Ditson fingering is good for following.

Thanks guys, I've printed the Ditson score out, and will have a proper look tomorow, I'm finding this hard lol, hope I can pull it off. I suppose the key is just to keep going

The key is not to get flustered by technical problems, Wayne. There's a resource here and you've plenty of time.

Thnx man

Wayne...I'm with you. Step by step anything is possible...even very challenging music

Love it! We in it together lol, we're in with the "in" crowd

Wayne, I apologise if I put you into a spin. To suggest trialling the ditson fingering for only an hour might have caused a bout of panic, maybe a sense that there’s so much to do you should quickly pass on to the next task? I meant only that within an hour you would probably begin to see that there was another way of doing things.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of good fingering. It’s a foundation stone. You’ve got that much time you should take however long is required to get it right.

Don’t paniiiic!!!

Lol, no probs I reckon I'm stickin' to my own fingering, I find it more comfortable

- I can understand that. Anyway, time for me to ditch the dogma. A touch of sustain and it can still sound good.

Looking forward to hearing it!

My Alfred Masterworks edition of the complete Songs Without Words, edited by Maurice Hinson, arrived. I like the explanatory and interpretive information Hinson gives about the Songs, but it turns out that, for Op. 30 No. 3 at least, in most places I prefer the fingering I got from the Peters edition edited by Theodor Kullak that I found on imslp. Kullak gives more fingering in essential places, and it's subtler, in particular in using finger 4. The one place I might prefer Hinson is in a measure of descending first inversion RH chords. Kullak gives a varied fingering that I suspect is meant to improve legato. Hinson gives a straight-forward series of 125, and achieves legato with pedal. But I'll give the Kullak fingering a try, because so far in all the places where I've thought "that's an odd fingering", his fingering has turned out to be very clever and efficient.

On the other hand, Hinson gives explicit pedal suggestions, which I shall probably adopt.

And, oh look, the Kullak-edited Peters edition is available to buy. (I appreciate imslp as a resource, but I dislike playing from flimsy printed-out sheet music and having unattached sheets of paper floating all over my piano. I like my music corralled in a book. Yes, I could put the print-outs in a notebook, but what a pain, and it's never as compact as a printed book.) It seems sort of silly to have not one, but two, editions of the Songs Without Words when almost all of them are much too hard for me and, unlike the Beethoven Sonatas or the Bach Preludes and Fugues, they're not my dream aspirational pieces. But I think I will buy this edition anyway.