Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner If good pro classical pianists try to play stride

I'm curious what people would predict about the amount of difficulty a top professional classical pianist would have with the LEFT HAND(so basically ignore the right hand parts)in difficult stride pieces. Would they be able to handle it easily or find it very difficult even with a lot of practice? Remember, the best stride pianists, besides having great natural talent, have been playing and practicing these kind of left hand passages for many years while classical pianists have very little or even virtually no practice with these kind of left hand passages.(I think Chopin's stride etude, the only classical piece I can think of resembling stride) is quite easy compared to these stride pieces)

I posted three pieces for reference or commentary. A not incredibly difficult, but certainly not easy, stride piece followed by two almost impossible sounding Tatum stride pieces.

Fats Waller:Handful of Keys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcR_v9kHE4Y
Art Tatum:Jumps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5qWC6VjCS0
Art Tatum:Tiger Rag(I'm only interested in the parts with the stride style left hand passages)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu7UP4wdn7I

I think you're underestimating pro classical pianists. A bit of practice, and it will be a piece of cake for them.

Stride jazzers are one-trick ponies. You never see them play fast wide leaps in both hands, which classical pianists have to do in a large number of pieces. Playing runs in RH and jumps in LH is straightforward in comparison. Lots of Chopin waltzes and mazurkas require big fast leaps in LH, even if not in stride style.

In contrast, I'd like to see a stride pianist play the coda to Schumann's March from his C major Fantasy, for instance.

Classical pianists are generalists with, if not all-encompassing (depending on the individual), very wide ranging technique.

But, the constant "from to" of stride LH is a specialist thing--like gospel, jazz comping, ballet class playing, etc.

So, yes, once they get accustomed (and if they want to). 😀

I can't imagine that the Tatum pieces I posted or any of his solo performances would be a piece of cake for any pianist. The Chopin Waltzes and Mazurkas LHs are extremely easy compared to even the easiest of the pieces I posted. In the Chopin the first beat is usually a single note vs. octaves or tenths in stride, the chords on the second and third beats are usually the same, the tempo is mostly slower than difficult stride pieces, and the leaps are usually much shorter. The Schumann Fantasy jumps I agree are very difficult although not exactly like stride passages where the LH makes continuous jumps for the entire piece.

Finally, I think you do the great stride pianists like James P.Johnson, Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Tatum, and Wellstood a great disservice by calling them one trick ponies.

It is rumored that Horowitz had a nervous breakdown trying to play like Tatum.

Bill Evans, who had a classical background, had to work really hard to do what he accomplished.

So, the piece of cake comes to those who practice. Always. 😀

It depends how fast you play them.

That's why the Schumann, with wide leaps in both hands, is much harder to play accurately. With stride, you can just keep your eyes on your LH.

Yet the Schumann Fantasy is a staple of conservatoire pianists. And even I can play it accurately at speed, even though I've never been to a conservatoire.


That's because they are one-trick ponies.

Classical pianists don't have this luxury of only playing a 'trick', or something they excel at, otherwise they'd have very limited repertoires and cannot sustain a career. Even Michelangeli, who had one of the most limited of concert repertoires of the great pianists, has performed everything from Rach 4 to Gaspard to Bach-Busoni to Brahms-Pag to Chopin Ballades & Scherzi to Debussy Préludes to Beethoven and Mozart concertos.

All those jazzers you mentioned played in one style - their style.

Even top-level classical pianists would have a great deal of difficulty meeting the left-hand demands of stride, and even after lots of practice. The music is simply too specialized in its left hand leaps at high rates of speed, and it really is an art "unto itself". I think the more important consideration, though, is that most classical pianists don't WANT to play ragtime/stride -- the aesthetic effort is simply not worth the effort needed to play stride effectively. And vice-versa: the ragtime pianist is not likely to find classical music interesting or exciting enough to deal with its unique demands. So, I consider it pretty much a moot question, really.

I definitely wouldn't consider Tatum a "one-trick" pony as someone previously suggested. I've studied a few of his improvisations before and listened to most of his recordings. The man had a monster technique in both hands, and had fantastic improvisational abilities. I consider him to be one of the top musicians of the last century, regardless of genre.

I think playing stride at his speed/accuracy would be a challenge for most performers regardless of their previous training. That isn't to say the best classical musicians couldn't do it, I just don't think many people could do it with the same sense of ease. There is also another limiting condition for playing his music, you need to be able to comfortably land on any 10th. Rolling 10ths at that speed just will not sound good in my opinion.

As for me, I consider all jazz to be a form of classical music, much more in the spirit of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms than any music written by someone who claims to be a classical composer these days.

1. Whether the Schumann is more difficult than a very difficult stride piece is not particularly relevant because the technical passages involved are somewhat different.

2. I've never heard a performance of a Chopin Mazurka with the left anywhere near as fast as fast stride pieces(like the last two I posted). Some Waltzes like Op. 42 or Op. 64 #1 may have LHs as fast as fast stride pieces but those LHs are extremely easy for all the other reasons I mentioned.

3. The phrase "one trick pony" is meant to be derogatory and emphasize that most stride pieces use similar left hand passage work. But one could just as easily argue that it's not the number of technical skills that are important but the quality of those skill(s).

Jazzers have a lot on modern classical musicians.

Let's not divide Jazz and classical people this way. They are both art musics, both underappreciated, both with diminishing audiences. We are comrades.

I'm not putting one group of pianists over the other. I greatly admire artists from both genres.

It's utterly astounding to heard someone call stride players "one trick ponies Utterly astounding. The fact is, and it's fact, there are LH passages in Tatum at a level of difficulty and artistry that don't exist in classical repertoire. Extended passages of walking tenths and striding tenths with filled in fifths and sevenths. "One-trick pony" generalisations say more about severe limitations of the commenter than limitations of pianists being commented on.

Here's a blog post

http://www.classicalmusicblogspot.com/horowitz-and-tatum-when-jazz-met-classical/

that attempts to fill in some of the story of the relationship between Tatum and Horowitz. With a clip of Horowitz playing Tatum's Tea for Two and a clip of Tatum playing Chopin's C# minor waltz. It's not a question of who's better or who's worse. But listen to Horowitz play Tea for Two and and find Tatum's version and listen to it IF you have ears, you can discern differences and observe artistry.

Some may like Tatum's Chopin in that blog post and some may not. But since the OP was asking about classical pianists playing stride the clip of Horowitz and Tea for Tea supplies more in the way of relevant answer than Tatum's Chopin. In any case, Tatum's Chopin isn't bad by any standard. It's just not the way it's played on a concert stage.

Let it also be said: knowing how to play with a jazz feel is indeed a big deal. Anyone who thinks that's easy or part of one-trick syndrome doesn't know what they're talking about. PERIOD. Horowitz had a lot of pianism within the scope of his artistry–an amazing amount. But a jazz feel wasn't part of that scope. The clip in that blog post demonstrates that.

Here's further information about the scope of Tatum's pianism–a book of transcriptions: https://samhimmelman.wikispaces.com/file/view/!Book!!Art_Tatum_-_Jazz_Piano_Solos_2.pdf

No.

Of course it's astounding.

To a jazzer.

BTW, that Horowitz-Tatum story gets trotted out ad nauseam every time the subject of jazz crops up here. It's getting tired.

I bought the complete Tatum recordings in a big CD box a few years ago, thinking that I'd enjoy it. Yes, for the first CD or so. Then everything gets very predictable........

I swear to god, playing the stride ending of Shostakovich's 1st PC without smudging it is in fact impossible at the requested tempo.

Tempo: presto
Left hand: in 8th notes, playing a low Bb octave, then a sixth formed by F and D, then a low F octave which is an octave below the previous sixth; then the sixth again, and repeats this 2 times.

Which is 2 times too many.

Only solution is to omit notes or slow down tempo to allegro.

That's just one example.

There are many leap sections in other 20th century repertoire that extens far longer than the passage from the shost.

FRANZ LISZT has EXTENSIVE USAGE of this technique in the left hand in many of his rhapsodies(pretty much all of them?), and other pieces, such as grand galop chromatique, and his etudes (Harmonies du soir, feux follets, Mazeppa)

RACHMANINOFF has used it as well; for example: his famous etude op. 39 no. 6.

SCHUMANN already got discussed here. The ending of the 2nd mvt. of his fantasia is a bear to play. It has two difficult leap figurations, one in each hand...

That's just the standard repertoire. Which is... the tip of the iceberg of the whole repertoire. And there are pianists that can even play those other pieces nearly flawlessly.

Tiger rag's leaps are to Schumann's fantasie's as Beethoven 1 is to Rach 3.

But that's just the leaps...

I've never felt the need to block anyone before, but I find this feature incredibly useful to block repugnant users.

Thank you!

I was going to suggest it myself - especially to all jazzers - but thought that would be pushing my notoriety a little too far, even for me........

Yuga Wang plays a pretty good Tatum. She even has a decent feel - she is an awesome player with a unbelievable technique (like Tatum). It isn't really jazz though - Tatum was making it up from his imagination, a different process, but it is good pseudo-jazz and great piano playing by any standards. Very few classical players can do this I think ...

https://youtu.be/pDwGMNWeDW4