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I don't think it's a choice between grace or banging our way through it. That's a false dichotomy that almost forces one to choose grace since most don't want to be accused of banging.

Agree on all counts -- but what I found most interesting about Jason's post was that he tied together what I consider two very different possible ways of viewing and playing the piece.

My first exposures to the piece were from recordings by Horowitz and Rubinstein. Horowitz's was as you said (brilliantly and frighteningly so); Rubinstein's was more elegant, a bit meditative. I much preferred Horowitz, that's what I felt the piece "is," and I had to wonder, 'What the heck is Rubinstein doing? That's not this piece.'

But years later, I had the pleasure and privilege of hearing Horszowski play the piece, at age 97 or so. (Rumor had it that he was actually 5 years older than that but didn't want people to think he was old.)
When I saw the Scherzo on the program, I wondered how a 97 year old could think of playing such a piece. What I heard was a revelation. He played it in a completely elegant, subdued, dreamlike way. It was transfixing, surely in part because you couldn't help appreciating the fact that this was a very old man doing this, but mainly because of how original and gorgeous it was.

If not for that performance, I wouldn't have much understood how Jason could have approached the piece as he did. And maybe I'm understanding it in a tilted way because of Horszowski, but anyway I'm understanding it.

Interesting thoughts, Mark.

Here's another perspective on my approach. First, I sometimes think that there's a tremendous gulf between what the performer is actually doing and what the listener hears, so that performance becomes like a magic trick, in which the pianist is aware of all kinds of tricks behind-the-scene and the listener is only aware of the effect of those tricks. For example, sometimes to conquer a difficult passage I insert some small pauses to allow for hand repositioning. Eventually, at speed, the pauses aren't noticeable to the audience, but I still feel them, and they still help me. They're a trick for executing the passage that only I know about.

Similarly, I think, with "elegance" in this Scherzo-- for concreteness, look at the B-minor arpeggio at the end of the 2nd measure after the opening chords. It's a beautiful, graceful phrase, and hearing its beauty, and therefore playing it lightly and not forcefully, greatly helped me bring this piece up to speed. Once it was there, ferocity was quite easy to add-- given the speed and the raw power of the notes themselves, a little goes a long way-- and I think the audience mainly hears ferocity. But I'm still hearing it through that elegant foundation I used-- it's my trick, and the audience probably doesn't know just how delicately I'm experiencing this very harrowing music.

But if you go for the ferocity directly, as I tried to do for a while, the piece becomes clumsy, tiring, hard to control.

I'll even make one of those annoyingly unprovable statements here, and say that perhaps the great pianists who do play this Scherzo ferociously actually have elegance and lightness built into their conception and practice of the work. We don't hear it, and maybe they're not even aware of it-- they are natural talents, after all. But I think it's there. I even think that a kind of lightness is there in almost *all* fast passagework at its core-- heaviness and ferocity, if they're desired, are added "on top".

-Jason

To me this is mostly saying you found some tricks to help you solve the technical problems in this piece, but the bottom line is that you think it is a ferocious piece. IMO it's one of Chopin's most consistently ferocious pieces, and almost impossible to classify otherwise. I remember Janina Fialkowska saying in a master class that it was important to use a fair amount of body language when playing the opening chords because this was one of Chopin's most violent works.

Afterthought about what piece has a comparable kind of difficulty:

Our guy asked for other Chopin pieces but I'm going to ignore the Chopin part of it, and give a "comp" that might seem bizarre, and I'm not sure it isn't.

I recently read an article on Nancy Williams' website, which is known to some people here. (I'll be posting about the article in a separate thread.) Something from that article made me think of this other piece in relation to the Scherzo. I'll bypass the details here and just get to the point at hand (literally).

Before, I said:



Well, something else like it did pop into my mind. Nancy's article seemed to highlight the way in which pieces of very different natures can be more similar than they seem, and it struck me that at times we may only realize it by seeing that the hand is doing a similar kind of thing.

In that light, I offer my off-the-wall nomination for 'technical challenge most similar to the 1st Scherzo' (and I'm serious!):



I suspect that most people would think right off the bat that this other piece can't possibly be a meaningful comp because it's not nearly as hard. But I think it is indeed comparably hard, and for what it's worth, for me it happens to be much harder.

God, that is seriously the best Prelude and Fugue he wrote. Both are absolutely perfect.. and the end of the Fugue is so noble, so powerful, as if he was composing for royalty. Very moving. Agghhh... The BEST!

That's awesome. And I was completely distracted and mesmerized by the scrolling guitar hero notation.

I agree with playing softly and gracefully in addition to playing slowly when learning difficult passages. It definitely helps me to understand my phrasing and playing louder or fiercer can be "added on top" later. It has the added bonus of ensuring that you don't hurt yourself from over-practice.