Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Grieg recital: Proposal.....

FarmGirl, I have the Peters Urtext edition. it's a c natural in measure 16 and a c flat in measure 18. The "melody" is going down (in octaves) starting in measure 15. F, E flat, d flat, c natural, c flat, all leading up to the big forte in measure 19 on b flat.

Notice that the pattern is repeated in measure 74 in a different key. the progression is down again, going b flat, a flat, g flat, f natural, f flat, all leading to the big fortissimo on e flat in measure 78.

Sam

In fact, "Wedding day" was the first classical piano piece I played. After some 6 years with the pump organ, mostly playing church music, my parents traded the organ for a piano. My first two years on the piano I spent mostly on pop music and musicals, playing by ear. Then I got the Grieg score as a Christmas gift. I learnt to play it in very short time, but did it really badly. I played fast, skipped many notes and covered up mistakes by overusing the pedal. Hopefully I have slightly improved since then.

Hmm, now we know what to be listening for

I love this piece, by the way, and will probably be inspired to learn it after this recital

I've got the Dover edition and it doesn't show the C natural in bar 16, or the F natural in bar 74!

This is rather disconcerting! I wonder how many other errors there are!

*coff coff* Fast, clean left hand arpeggios in polyrhythm at the end of the main theme and restatement

Pressure's on Ganddalf!

Well, being native Norwegian and with piano experience since 1966 I should accept a "handicap" in an ABF recital with Grieg music. And when comes to the time of comments and feedback, I'll be more than happy if I get some constructive critisism.

I doubt I'll have any, you play so well!

Andy and Cheryl
Thank you for checking the score you have. I'm happy that at least one edition (Peters) confirms my thought about the flat. I think Dover edition was a little sloppy. When I saw the flat sign on measure 18 and did not see natural sign in measure 16, I thought hmm, they probably missed or did not
bother natural in measure 16 since the flat is in the key signature. So I played it in both ways and the way I thought it should be (measure 16 without flat) sounded better. As Andy mentioned there is similar pattern towards the end. Thanks again

Rossy, in the next list update, please take my name off of the 57/1 Vanished Days as a second choice. The Peace of the Woods will be enough for me I think for this recital. Vanished Days is beautiful but more that I want to take on in the next few months. I hope it gets picked up by someone though because it is a lovely piece! Thanks!

You're welcome FarmGirl --- what is "interesting" is that on the back cover of my book it ways "...reprinted here from the original editions published by C.F. Peters of Leipzig...."

I will mark my text, and hope that when I play any other pieces I have a good enough ear to recognize any other glitches! Time will tell!

Well that was timely!

If you don't mind, Valencia, I'll seize the opportunity and take your liberated 57,1 as my first choice - I've been getting progressively disenchanted with my 62,6 (Homeward) which is brisk but too happy for my current mood.

So, Rossy, if you could make the change for me then? My first choice changes from 62,6 to 57,1
Cheers, mate!

Yay! I'm glad you picked up this piece dire tonic! From the little bit of dabbling I did with the score, I found it beautiful but very challenging, so am relieved that it is passed on to you! Enjoy!

Two questions: Is it better to learn from a published urtext of this piece or a copy of it from Imslp? I was currently working from a copy from Imslp, but I have see quite a few comments about purchasing a copy of the music. Secondly, I haven't played a piece in 6/8 before and I am having a little trouble transforming my knowledge of the mathematical structure to one of actually playing the notes. I know my teacher could answer all these questions, but I was trying to work on the first page so that I was a little more familiar with the piece before my next lesson, so we could work on more specific things in the lesson.

I believe the IMSLP version is Peters, which appears to be urtext from a previous poster who is working from this score, so you should be fine.
You will want to look for the shortest note value to figure out how you should count this. Luckily the rhythm seems to repeat itself quite a bit so if you learn the first measure the inner and lower voices remain the same rhythmically. Just to top note (melody) changes. I would ignore the grace notes for now until you get the rhythm down. It's not hard to add them in later as long as you make fingering choices when not playing them to account for an extra finger available to play it (hope that makes sense).

Also, looks like you only have a few 16th notes (which would mean you'd have to add the 'and' in between the counting of the beats, so 1+2+3+4+5+6+ just in those measures). Otherwise, you just count 123456. 8th notes get one beat, quarters get two beats, dotted quarters get 3, dotted half notes the whole 6 beats.

Peters was the original publisher for the lyric pieces, so editions or scans of the Peters scores should be pretty good. The edition I have was published in 2007 and is titled the Piano Works Volume I, Lyric Pieces, and is an urtext version. Which doesn't mean that it is free of errors, just that the editors tried to get as close as possible to the original score.

Sam

Just got my copy of Sailors Song. I hope I didn't bite off more than I can chew!

I just printed out the score, played through part of it (slowly ) and then listened to a couple of performances to make sure.

A bit of theory first. There's a kind of time signature which I learned as "compound time" where the top number is a multiple of three: 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8*. Each "three" (eighths in this case) forms one beat as if there were triplets, so 6/8 time has two beats [(1+1+1) (1+1+1)]. Well, like this:


If you look at the bass, you get a relentless rhythm:
1--2--3-- / 1-- 2--3
long-short long-short

You can feel these beats of (long-short) (long-short) in the bass and lower notes in the treble. Your melody has its own rhythm, but even it falls inside this feeling of three-pulse beats.

I don't usually like animated scores because they're sort of mechanical, but you can really see this long-short rhythm here. A lot of the more sophisticated performances were less rigid.


* Not every piece with these signatures have this kind of triplet timing, but many do.

I think you mean Sam, not Andy!

I have a stupid question...
In this measure, is the second grace note F#, like the note preceding it, or F natural?

Your case is 100% clear. The main note has an F#, the grace must too.

If it were the other way around, it would perhaps be less clear. Accidentals within ornamentation is slightly open to interpretation but the general rule is: If the accidental occurs within the staff (including ledger lines), it carries forward. If it occurs within the ornamentation symbol, it is less clear and depends on context.