This is a rare gem. To sit alongside Dr. Leslie Howard and receive a tutorial on one of the gems in all of the piano repertoire. This is remarkable. Thank you, Dr. Howard, for posting this.
@@maleficfig68, Liszt is famous for 2 things, 1) his famous piano music, and 2) him being the oldest person alive, now being 208 years old on the 22nd of this month!! Unless... unless, Liszt really did die in 1886 and that the person on this UA-cam comment section is only claiming to be Liszt and isn't really him. I just thought of that now for the first time....hmmm...could that be it? ...naahhh. Lol 😂😂
Just discovered this. Absolutely wonderful. I wish there were more of these types of videos that analyse the great works in such a personal and interesting way.
This is without question the most magnificent lecture on any piece of music ever presented. I simply cannot believe I did not know about this great musician until yesterday.
What a treasure. What a treasure! Thank you, Dr. Howard, so much for this exploration into one of the greatest pieces in the piano repertoire. I am but a novice in such matters, but your conversation is much appreciated! Thank you, again!
I have watched this maybe a dozen times. It's marvelous. He really understands Liszt. My 94 year old mother when she was very young study piano with Josè Vianna da Motta.
My friend Alice won his 99 Liszt-CD's when she was not far from her 80s. Now she is 91. I got a nice dedicace when he was jury in Budapest. Thanks, maestro Howard. Thanks Cyprien Katsaris!
Very good and informative, not at all pretentious either, it never seemed, as it often does with academics, that he was just saying lots of long words without actually conveying anything. Precise and to the point.
A clear illustration of what ' real' music consists of and also of true understanding of the score. My music Mistress always stressed " only play what the composer has written!" I understand her now, aided by Mr Howard!
THOUGH QUITE LENGTHY, THIS ANALYSIS BY LESLIE HOWARD IS AMAZINGLY CRITICAL TO UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCES OF PIANISTS' INTERPRETATION OF THE ACTUAL LISZT'S PURPOSE OF THE PIECE. I WISH THIS WERE AVAILABLE FOR ALL ARTISTS ORIGINAL PURPOSES.
I very much appreciate his comments about the importance of carefully observing Liszt's indicated articulations. I'm alarmed at how many musicians largely ignore such nowadays. I've observed these very same issues in Liszt's Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad Nos" for organ (written in 1850, so while he was writing the piano Sonata), and find that they have a vital effect on the work's musical impact.
I don’t understand what he’s talking about because I’m musically illiterate. I’m like a child staring at stars and galaxies and supernovas but I’m not a physicist. I’ve listened to lots of classical music over the years and listening to the pros talk about the music never stops amazing me.
You have hit all the points! I finally decided to take on this piece a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to wait until next year, but I'm very pleased with the progress. And by the way, I'm one of those players who play the low B the second time around during the theme/motif, I love the dramatic sensation it adds.
I agree with him saying how some of the concert pianists play this piece too fast, such as how Valentina plays it. She's extremely talented, and I sure don't know how to play the piece as fast as she can without stumbling. But for the listeners, faster is not always automatically better. To really hear the beauty of this Sonata, it needs to be played around a certain speed, not too slow or too fast, and it needs to have the right feeling and touch to really sound great and melodic. Too fast starts to blurr that sound.
34:30 -34:40 - I find a kind of soft beauty in this section that he begins to play. It's slow, simple, and soft, and doesn't need to be otherwise because it then wouldn't have the same style of soft romantic beauty to it if played differently. It's the section which lasts until the part he begins playing at 34:41. 35:38 - this is only my opinion: this is only part of this sonata repeated twice completely identically because this is the one renouned tune in B minor which officially helps make this the Sonata in B minor. I've simply called it the piece's main B minor melody. 41:05 - definitely is a reprise from earlier in the piece, except on B major instead of D major. Numerous parts of the "third movement" do that, copy from the "first movement" either in a semi-altered way and/or on a different key. 42:21 - 42:31 - right after these bars, the section that begins directly afterwards is almost a complete duplicate of a section in the "first movement", the only change is the key it's played on. It being so similar is likely why he decided to completely skip talking about it and go right to the presto part near the end. 46:02 - I like that part of you really hearing the piece softly winding down. He plays it slightly faster though than I've heard the other pianists play it. 48:20 - those slow low single descending notes are similar to the slow low descending notes at the end of the middle section of the sonata. One recording I heard of this piece ended the sonata there and didn't play those last beautiful chords, I think that was a mistake. 50:25 - 50:48 - I agree, I too love those last soft higher up chords. They make the very end of this piece sound like a beautiful floating spirit rising up into the sky. And, perhaps it is the same spirit which was floating around during the section of the middle slow movement that he begins playing at 34:30
Thank you so much for this very clear lecture Mr. Leslie Howard! After studying the Liszt Sonata for so long now I finally understand how to play this piece especially concerning tempo and articulation. THANK YOU !!!
I know this Sonata very well. Just like in Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, and Tschaikovsky's "5th Symphony", Liszt's "B Minor Sonata" focuses also on cyclic form in its themes' usages. 4-6 or 7 motives are used within the whole sonata, and each of the reprises or reinstatements of these motives try to make this 30-minute-or-so sonata unified in its thematic concepts. The final measures of the Sonata, if I were Hans von Bulow describing this, would be like this.... "A certain man is bedridden and told that he is going to succumb to tuberculosis". The final low-octave restatements of the 1st theme represents the man's final breaths, and then, the chaplain (on the low pedal point C, then, the A minor/F major/B chord sequence), touches the moribund patient's hand and does his final-rite prayer on him, and the patient smiles at him. Eventually, the patient's face goes down to the side for the last time and never breathes again (the lone low B note), indicating that he is now pronounced dead."
I am such a fan of this great and brilliant human being. I first learned of him many, many years ago when I was searching for decent recordings of Les préludes - one of my favorite works from when I was in high school. Once I found Leslie Howard's rendition it immediately became my favorite; all orchestral performances of that romantic opus paled in comparison - in my mind anyway. I am absolutely thrilled to be listening to the man speak. He is as classy yet down to earth as I had hoped. BTW - It is so cool that his Guinness Book of World Records award is displayed beneath that famous Liszt photo (5:34 and many other times as well). Love it! :-)
This is the coolest channel on UA-cam!! I thought this channel would only exist for me in Heaven. Great explanation of the work by Maestro Howard. Love the Lisztiana in the background!
I now understand that Liszt's opens up this Sonata by making the so-called 3rd relationship as frequently used in Romantic classical music theory. The key center actually starts in roughly G minor in the "piano" section (first 5 bars), and then, in that first explosive tirade, the rage-filled fortissimo in the G octaves, he transitions through the diminished chords (roughly leading to the vii07) finally to the B minor key center when we get into measure 12.
The master speaks. It was Leslie who persuaded me to do the very thing that he recommends here, first to study the Gosses Konzertsolo. To those who are critical of Leslie's own performance of the sonata I say, meet the man and hear him live. An extremely impressive person in every respect.
Great lecture, a very comprehensive guide to this masterpiece! I wonder what Mr. Howard has to say about Klindworth's D-natural on the last page (mm. 738 and 740). All editions print those measures with D-sharp as the top note, but Karl Klindworth has assured an editor once that Liszt himself told him to play the top not of those two chords (mm. 738 and 740) as D-natural instead of D-sharp. Arthur Friedheim, who gave the premiere recording of the piece, played the chord with D-natural, but only the second chord; I don't remember other recordings that use D-natural in those spots.
@@gerardbedecarter Do you happen to know which one? I have a copy of Bärenreiter, Henle study score, and Dover's reprint of Breitkopf&Härtel, and none of them contains Klindworth's D-natural; I've also looked up all editions in IMSLP, but didn't find it either. Dover's reprint does mention it in their editorial notes, though.
Whilst I have enormous respect for Leslie and appreciate that it can be fascinating to intricately study the scores of frequently performed masterpieces and examine the discrepancies between the composer's "intentions" and artistic "liberties", if every pianist only ever "parroted" what what written in the manuscript, there would be very little reason for progressive generations of virtuosi to interpret these works, other than to demonstrate the benefits offered by state of the art recording technology. If accepting his claim at 11:26, Brendel, Argerich, Kissin, Zimmerman, Horowitz, Barere, Pollini, Katsaris, Richter, Lisitsa, Gilels, Yundi Li, Bolet, Yuja Wang, Arrau, Curzon, Pletnev, Cziffra, Hamelin, Rubenstein, Freire and Berezovsky, are all "sloppy" and "thoroughly bad"....sorry but....!
There is plenty of ways to interpretate a piece without changing the text. Of course everybody has the right to play whatever he wants, but if someone deliberately puts his own taste in front of the composer's intention is just a Liberace. We don't know if all the pianists you cited had a correct edition. Besides that; the fact that you was trying to demonstrate your point "ab auctoritate" says it all about its validity
@@cesarecherchi6617 Or Liszt, who was notorious for adding extra notes and speeding and slowing passages. I think we should differentiate a performance of the piece in it's original intention and an individual interpretation
@@8beef4u He wasn't notorious for "adding notes and speeding and slowing passages", in fact a lot of witnesses of its Beethoven Concertos in Weimar reports the exact opposite. I have no idea of where you got your informations...
Yes if they did it as he said then they are sloppy, they’re not gods and they don’t dig for every little thing in the piece. You are not allowed to change the text, you can change the interpretation sure, but straight up changing the author’s intentions is forbidden, if you want to do that then write your own piece
Regarding his "sloppy" and "thoroughly bad" comment, I think this refers specifically to the parts where this motive appears (with this specific articulation), not necessarily that a performance is thoroughly bad *just* because they didn't obey that one specific instruction (it also seems just part of his characteristically witty humour, we shouldn't take this too personally). Ultimately, though, Howard does not call for people to play the text in the same way - this is impossible, given that even the same pianist might play this same piece with a different piano and in a different hall, which by default will alter, to a certain degree, how the pianist approaches certain passages (for instance, in a place with too much natural reverb, one should use less pedal than they normally would). I believe that his main goal here is that, to use your words, pianists don't always "parrot" what other pianists do in their recordings; in other words, to not put one's ego before the piece, and to examine the text critically, rather than mindlessly accepting "traditions" that - at times - completely contradict what's written in the text. For instance, in the "Recitativo" section Howard refers to at around 27:50, quite a lot of pianists take the "liberty" to """interpret""" this section in complete contradiction to the actual text, by playing both recitative phrases extremely soft - something that can only be explained by the fact that they heard someone playing this passage soft and decided to "parrot" it, rather than looking at the 'forte' indication in Liszt's original text. There's nothing wrong with listening to recordings for inspiration, but one should exercise caution when doing so.
Unlike what Mr. Howard is saying at 22:00, the last note after the triplet is joined by a slur both times in this section in my edition. In his edition, they are separated. I don't see anything wrong with playing these a little more legato. They don't always have to be played the same way.
Listen to Mr. Howard's ideas to rejuvenate your interpretation, but do not get mired down by his opinions. His opinions are rebukes meant for lazy uncritical thinking students. If you are watching this lecture, you are likely not one of them. If you understand the work compositionally and structurally: the work is mostly derived from three thematic statements that interact and transform one another to tell a very compelling unspoken story within a large structural frame, you are good to go.
People will probably slate me when/if reading this... But I think that all aspiring pianists should set their goals high. Go for it! Try learning it. If you start to learn a piece with the intention of completely mastering it, I believe that any piece is possible. And from my own experience, attempting a piece as difficult as this (as a lot of Liszt's works are!) makes other pieces that are less involved/demanding seem easier. Don't limit yourself :)
Great video! But I wonder if claiming this is "wrong" by arguments like "this is not an introduction" or "there are only 3 tempi" is too strong I think in music there is indeed a lot if structure, but there is also so much beyond logic. And for luck pianists play the piece quite differently. I am happy for both Gilels and Zimerman.
I've watched this video about half a dozen times in the last three years since I found it. Looks like ole Leslie has still an axe to grind after all these years -- he has never really got over being kicked out of AC/DC.
I was hoping for a grand review filled with colourful opinions and interpretations of this masterpiece for what it is. Not a THIS is how you should play this piece video.
Friedrich Hueppe Leslie Howard is not just any old “concert pianist”. He has recorded on CD every Liszt composition extant:a multi decade long undertaking consisting in 94 discs which resulted in the Guinness Book record for length of a record set.
You missed the point of the video. This book is actually edited by him.
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Exactly! You got something of much more value: an expert's guide on how to correctly play this piece, and not be misguided from other people's arbitrary decisions, quite often going against the composer's indications, placed very carefully in the score.
Some aspects of his lecture do sound as though he intended to say, in your words, "THIS is how you should play the piece", but I don't think it's quite the case here. Rather, he is pointing to the fact that, while there's no problem in listening to other recordings for interpretation, we should exercise critical thinking when looking at the original text, and - most importantly - not put one's ego before the piece itself.
Very great analysis by Mr. Howard, but in the end, a pianist can do whatever he wants or feels like is right. After all, Liszt and most other composers were pianists (or whatever instrument they played), and I'm sure they performed a piece however they felt. You're supposed to make the piece your own.
Sure, if you want to settle for a sentimental mess instead of Liszt's vision. By the way, the book is actually edited by him so I think it makes sense for him to talk about editorial details.
WolfPsx While this is true, a pianist should not just take every written thing literally. After all, they are sort of like suggestions. I’m sure Liszt overly interpreted many works since he was a great virtuoso and that was the popular thing to do in those days. The pianist should add some of their thoughts into the piece as well.
WolfPsx In the end it doesn’t even matter that much what he wrote. The goal of music is to make people happy or sad or what ever it might be. The goal is to make music sound as good as possible and not to play every single detail as if you were working on something mechanical. After all music is an art. Of course there is lots of work behind every piece but in the End you want to touch the soul of every one in the audience. Nobody will care after if you played that group of notes just like Liszt asked. By the way literally nobody plays the sonata like he suggests here. He, Leslie Howard himself doesn’t even follow some of his tips.
@@classicalmusiclover4029 Fair enough, everyone has their own opinion. I personally find great composers such as Liszt way more interesting than any interpreter, even though I'm one myself. I'm not talking about absolutes here, of course there's always personal shaping, but I think following the score exactly with things like phrasing of the main themes and tempi usually makes the result more powerful, structured and easier to listen to.
I wonder about Liszt expecting a pianist to pedal in the first part where there are no markings. If he can put a tempo marking at the beginning and end of the piece, but not in the middle because if he wanted that way he would have, then pedal markings should be thought of in the same way. Debussy heard Liszt play in Rome and said he was surprised by how little pedal he used.
Thank you for this. I’m not qualified to suggest which modern performance adheres to the manuscript more than others, but I suspect it wouldn’t be the most inspired or rewarding one. 🧛♂️
Hello Mr. Howard , What is the name of the Liszt piano composition that you said precedes the musical style of The Piano Sonata in B Minor, S178 ? Thank you very much for presenting this lecture.
I don't know of any sonata that touched me more deeply - together with William Byrd's motet "Aspice Domine", published in 1575, or Keith Jarrett's Part II of his legendary improvised (!) Cologne Concert on Friday January 24th, 1975 , as well as several works by J.S.Bach that cannot be listed here, it belongs to the musical summit works for which I am infinitely grateful ... FRANZ LISZT: Die h-moll-Sonate (1849-1853) S.178 (The Piano Sonata in b-minor) : ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtzF7zFf5JvJJOSp9y1RsLqd.html FRANZ LISZT (1811 - 1886) : Cantando espressivo (- Sonate in h-moll,1853) ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtyPK9citStePeuqbll7N3sp.html FRANZ LISZT (1811 - 1886): Fuge - Allegro energico ( - Sonate in h-moll , 1853) ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtzeF_BAxDxCwLq0JNY6oZJl.html
FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886): Au Lac Du Wallenstadt (Années de pèlerinage - Première année: Suisse, S. 160)(1848-1854) ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtybv9SpIsP0MtDIkX3urBUF.html
I just listened to his recording of this soanta, it seems like he pretty much never followed his own advice with regards to pedalling and articulation.
Somone help. What other piece was he talking about at the 1:11 mark? I couldn't understand what he said. I tried searching up random things that sounded similar but had no luck.
Leslie is cool. Very few people talk about Liszt that well. Fascinating to see the MS edition. And I'm just curious, who was this fellow that stretched the Sonata to 47 minutes? :-)
Valery Afanassiev's is the longest interpretation I have, (and that I know of). His is is 42 minutes long! I must say it is an interesting approach. Certainly not on my list of favorites, but preferable to many of the, "have notes, will play" empty virtuoso versions we hear from younger players, (too young to play the Liszt Sonata in the first place IMO) today.
I think he is rather ill - and it sounds like it in that recording. I am not in anyway mocking him but having been to a concert of his a couple of years ago at hte Festival Hall I am worried that he is actually being exploited. If he isn;t ill I genuinely wonder he deliberately playing a way to see how far he can push it before nobody claps - at the RFH (a truly awful experience) he looked genuinely surprised when people clapped.
I respect this guys’s wisdom and knowledge on this sonata, but a performance with that strict of a tempo and zero implementation of the performer’s own liberty to make this piece his/her own will leave this piece devoid of any emotion or soul. What you will have is a “perfect” copy where the stiff necked performer cares only for the accuracy of the interpretation. The romantic era was primarily about the performer. Remember that Liszt himself added his own preferences to the pieces of Chopin and others he admired.
I don't agree. The Liszt Sonata is not your composition. It was created at a specific moment in time, inspired by very specific events etc., and the work is as such a result of all that. To recreate it exactly accordingly the composer's indications is the most difficult thing to do as it requires the complete elimination of your ego. If you devote your time 100% to the composer's expressions, there is no room for personal mannerisms. They simply disappear. You have to access the templates of the music itself instead of imposing your own mannerisms-templates that would serve only to divorce you from the musical content. You serve as a "channel." What I mean is:I recently listened to 4 pianists playing the Bb Schubert Posthumous Sonata..score in hand.Radu Lupu, Alfred Brendel, Rudolf Serkin and Sviatoslav Richter.All of them followed meticulously Schubert's indications...yet they all sounded unique. But it would be interesting to learn which changes and personal touches you would ad to improve on the original. Let me ask you: Would you ad some brushstrokes or paint on Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa"? Respectfully.
Ya I disagree as well. If you play an instrument serious then you should know copying the exact interpretation becomes a natural part of you when your learning and feels exactly natural in hearing it as a listener, it would never sound unnatural like you would hear in sight reading.
@@thepianocornertpc I agree with your general idea, but since musical notation is a limited and more or less primitive way of reflecting the composers intentions, the notation is sort of an instruction to put the work of art together again in a dynamic process of creation. That leaves a lot of freedom for the artist. In that respect it is totally different from a painting which is a finished and static thing. If Da Vinci would make another Mona Lisa, it would be different. In fact many panters revisit a motif often and the respective paintings are often very differing, although they tried to recreate the same idea in every one of them. When we hear composers perform their own work, we are not seldom very surprised to hear all kinds of unexpected differences between their interpretation and what we would have expected according to the score alone. It is not a mathematical process. To one composition there belongs perhaps only one "best" score, but in the reverse engineering there appear many "best" performances of it.
@@paulmetdebbie447 I beg to disagree. The argument "limited or more or less primitive way of notation" doesn't hold really. For more than 300 years, composers had enough time, opportunities and their genius to improve on the notation system ..if needed. Given the wealth of incredible beautiful creations notated,with accordingly you a primitive system, they didn't seem to feel the need to do that. I find our notation system ingenious, clever, far-reaching with endless possibilities for permutations etc. The immense output of musical creations is testimony to that. Just take any Debussy Prelude or Scriabin Poeme or Sonata to see the countless indications of what these composers exactly wanted. To see the relationships of all these parameters in a Liszt Sonata requires obviously greater observational skills and well-developed cognitive powers. The great Walter Gieseking once said that reading and contemplating a score is the most difficult thing to do because our immense ego immediately wants to interfere. Also, Michelangeli told me something similar. A very Zen-like thought. To observe and UNDERSTAND the intricate relationships between the myriad dynamic indications and note-profile is unfortunately beyond most of us. The Mona Lisa argument is false. Any composition was created at a very specific moment in time as the result of psychological fluctuations. A painting ..a symphony, a Sonata, a Prelude and Fuga..it doesn't matter. Both, a painting or a score are "static" as long as one doesn't touch it or activates it. Liszt composed another Sonata..the Dante Sonata, a completely different narrative and story..obviously it's different from the Sonata in B Minor. So would be "another " Mona Lisa. But...why paint another Mona Lisa? Da Vinci never did so. Your quote: When you hear composers perform their own works...etc? Which composers? Rachmaninov? Ok..listen to him, score in hand, playing his own concerti...not one time he changes his own dynamics! What other composers-recordings are you referring to? Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann? The only thing we have from them is the score and mostly overly-sentimental accounts of biased admirers. I repeat: I recently listened to Schubert's B Flat Posthumous Sonata played by 4 different pianists..Richter, Radu Lupu, Serkin and Alfred Brendel in hand....all of them followed the scored and obliged meticulously Schubert's indications. Yet, they all sounded different! Keep in mind they did not alter anything. IMHO it all depends on the cognitive powers and abilities of the performer or better, mediator. Only those who are capable to eliminate their ego, or at least keep it at bay, are capable of doing justice to the score at hand. many present-day performers show an astounding lack of these much-needed qualities. Oh yes! technical wizardry "a volonte" but ..something is missing. Nog een prettige dag verder.😉
Anthonia M I've always liked the Brendel live performance from Japan, I think that's still on youtube and it is also bound to be based on thorough research.
About articulation - it's why I find Mozart so incredibly useful to play. His music is virtually driven entirely by articulation, and learning it well and properly is extremely useful for just about all other music for piano.
Hello! I have become interested since 17 years old to learn compositions and I have seen that many times performances aren't quite on the spot with what the composers intended. Especially with composers like Chopin and Liszt. And that makes me want to play the compositions myself instead of listening to them being performed. For example, nocturne op. 15 no. 2 the doppio movimento section. Everything that Dr. Howard have said in this lecture makes sense but one thing makes me wonder. The triplets that were supposed to be apart and Dr. Howard says that most of the time they are played sloppy. I can't understand that since if I were to play it that way, it would be 5 quick notes in succession with the 4-th one skipped (sorry, not good in terminology).
Most likely lol - there is a live recording of Pogorelic playing Liszt's Sonata on YT (among a few other versions), and it is 49 minutes long (and does get quite boring after a while). His version of Brahms's Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2 is quite interesting, also much slower than how the average performer plays it. For certain pieces, a noticeably slower tempo can be a good alternative to bring certain aspects of the composition that otherwise might be lost in a faster rendition, but I don't think this works at all with a piece like Liszt's Sonata.
@@ArielMagno91 Really? Pogorelic? Well he has a performance of the Chopin Sonata in B minor that lasts 36 minutes, so maybe it's believable that he has a Liszt Sonata performance over 45 minutes. ;)
@@bergeronscores605 There's a recording of that performance on YT, a live performance from 2012, the video is 49:14 long. He did make a studio recording of it, which clocks at just under 34 minutes - definitely more tasteful than the live performance, but still not quite my cup of tea. Some of my favorite renditions of Liszt's Sonata (available on YT at least) include Martha Argerich's famous recording (the first one I ever heard of this piece), Nelson Freire's live performance at University of Maryland (quite an impressive rendition, especially for a live performance), and Krystian Zimerman's studio recording for Deutsche Grammophon - the greatest dilemma for a performer is to find the balance between faithfulness to the score/composer's intentions and personal expression/freedom, and I think Zimerman strikes an almost perfect balance between them (as he does in almost everything he plays, in my opinion).
The way he doesn't play the triplet joined in the main theme, the triplet loses its rhythm and becomes two 64ths and one 32nds. So what's more important, the articulation, or the rhythm???
I think Dr Howard means something like this: imaging 'cellos playing the A to D sweep at bars 13/14 as a crescendo glissando all in one down bow and know that it should not sound like that on the piano. It is not intended to be a harrumph! or 'clearing the throat' noise. Then imagine the 'cellos articulating the triplet on an up bow and playing the D on a down bow. The figure becomes 'melodic'. We might conclude that if this difference in delivery cannot be discerned, the tempo is too fast?
Not to mention the fact that Howard's demonstrated triplet takes the space of an 8th note, rather than a 16th note as in the score. The result is that it sounds rhythmically equal to the repeated 8th notes that follow, which has a clear effect on the motivic shape. At any reasonable tempo, the triplet 32nd notes (especially in that bass register) will be indistinct. Howard's insistence on the separation of the end of the slur becomes silly. There's simply not enough time!
Anton Wills-Eve 1 second ago Oddly I would put Yuja Wang's performance way out on its own of all the 37 pianists I have heard play the sonata in the last 60 or so years. But why? Leslie is a fine pianist, his Liszt rhapsody no 10 was even a 'must hear' for university students in the UK in the 70's and 80's. But this music is what in Italian we call an 'aggiornamento', or modern, updated version of anything. Pope St.John XX111 even used it as his reason for summoning the second Vatican Council - ie to bring the Church up to date in the modern world. Well, be honest now, has anybody else in the last 10 years updated this sonata more emotionally and penetratingly to the mind than Yuja Wang? For me the answer is no. For everything else discussed or commented above, all I can say is 'I know what I Iike, and I like it when I hear it'. The great thing about this sonata is that not even the composer knew what people were going to hear, think and enjoy when they heard it. So, for Liszt's sake, we must bow to the aggiornamento of this wonderful out-pouring of his soul in musical terms, and hope that our present day pianists are trying to do the same. Yuja Wang is!! I can't wait to hear if Ju-Hee Lim will produce some equally novel performance.
Anton Wills-Eve Il y a 1 seconde Bizarrement je mettrais la performance de Yuja Wang à l'écart de tous les 37 pianistes que j'ai entendus jouer de la sonate ces 60 dernières années. Mais pourquoi? Leslie est un bon pianiste, sa rhapsodie n ° 10 de Liszt était même un «must» pour les étudiants universitaires au Royaume-Uni dans les années 70 et 80. Mais cette musique est ce que l'on appelle en italien un aggiornamento, ou une version moderne et actualisée de tout. Le pape JeanXX111 l'a même utilisé comme raison pour convoquer le deuxième Concile du Vatican, c'est-à-dire pour mettre l'Église à jour dans le monde moderne. Eh bien, soyez honnête maintenant, est-ce que quelqu'un d'autre au cours des 10 dernières années a mis à jour cette sonate de façon plus émotionnelle et pénétrante à l'esprit que Yuja Wang? Pour moi, la réponse est non. Pour tout ce qui est discuté ou commenté ci-dessus, tout ce que je peux dire, c'est «je sais ce que j'aime, et je l'aime quand je l'entends». Ce qui est bien avec cette sonate, c'est que même le compositeur ne savait pas ce que les gens allaient entendre, penser et apprécier quand ils l'entendraient. Donc, pour l'amour de Liszt, nous devons nous incliner devant l'aggiornamento de cette merveilleuse sortie de son âme en termes musicaux, et espérer que nos pianistes actuels essaient de faire la même chose. Yuja Wang l'a fait !! Je ne peux pas attendre pour entendre si Ju-Hee Lim produira une performance tout aussi unique.
This sonata sounds like the piano part of a larger piano concerto, with the instrumental missing, lost, or never written out. Maybe they will show up some day some place? Once aware of this, one can hear the missing orchestral part where there seem to be holes in the piano score. This can be discovered in the Rachmaninoff piano concertos with the orchestral part left out, ( but known)
I'm looking at the Liszt manuscript right now (it's available for free on IMSLP) and what I'm seeing does not match up with what Howard says about Liszt's slurs at all.
This is a rare gem. To sit alongside Dr. Leslie Howard and receive a tutorial on one of the gems in all of the piano repertoire. This is remarkable. Thank you, Dr. Howard, for posting this.
Beautiful explanation! I'm glad someone is taking my sonata seriously :)
😄
How are you everywhere 😂
@@maleficfig68, Liszt is famous for 2 things, 1) his famous piano music, and 2) him being the oldest person alive, now being 208 years old on the 22nd of this month!! Unless... unless, Liszt really did die in 1886 and that the person on this UA-cam comment section is only claiming to be Liszt and isn't really him. I just thought of that now for the first time....hmmm...could that be it? ...naahhh.
Lol 😂😂
@@alvexok5523 I wouldn't be surprised if in all his godliness that he's still alive and kicking😂
@@mangodraws6875, well, his music sure is
This is so extremely valuable as someone who is studying this piece right now. Thank you
omg fanchen
big fan
This guy recorded the entirety of Liszt's solo piano works. On a 99 CD box set xD
Wow hi both of you pianos.
andrecampana_ yeah. I’ve spent months lost in it 😎😎😎😎😎
Unfortunately I find him the world's most boring Liszt player!
@@prancer9980 its 100 now at my count. New discoveries vol 4
@@prundonmcavoy7155 CORTOT he's not, but it is totally unfair to call him boring. We all need to learn the non-sensationalistic side of LISZT.
Just discovered this. Absolutely wonderful. I wish there were more of these types of videos that analyse the great works in such a personal and interesting way.
Thank you @Sitbon! Do check out our channel you will find more than 10 other lectures and many more to come... enjoy!
This is without question the most magnificent lecture on any piece of music ever presented. I simply cannot believe I did not know about this great musician until yesterday.
Howard's floor-to-ceiling booshelves full of scores is an absolute dream !
What a treasure. What a treasure! Thank you, Dr. Howard, so much for this exploration into one of the greatest pieces in the piano repertoire. I am but a novice in such matters, but your conversation is much appreciated! Thank you, again!
I have watched this maybe a dozen times. It's marvelous. He really understands Liszt. My 94 year old mother when she was very young study piano with Josè Vianna da Motta.
It sounds fantastic.... almost unbelieveable. Yes, time is a strange thing...
Really a great video. I’m not a big fan of Liszt but this made me go back to the astonishing Zimerman recording. One of the absolute best recordings.
THAT WINK THO 30:16
Thank you very much Mr Howard for your hard work and musicalogical research .Liszt was a giant among giants and gave us this wonderful sonata.😊
My friend Alice won his 99 Liszt-CD's when she was not far from her 80s. Now she is 91. I got a nice dedicace when he was jury in Budapest. Thanks, maestro Howard. Thanks Cyprien Katsaris!
Amazing how you take studying music to a whole new level! I could listen to you all day,
I wish they would have "An evening with Liszt" here in NZ, I would definitely go
Such an invaluable video and it achieves that status so effortlessly! Mr. Howard, thank you for your wonderful service!
Very good and informative, not at all pretentious either, it never seemed, as it often does with academics, that he was just saying lots of long words without actually conveying anything. Precise and to the point.
top pianist to play Liszt, have the complete collection, a magnum opus for Leslie Howard, bravo
Wonderful! This is the kind of insight which should be much more spread. Thanks so very much to whoever uploaded it and especially to Mr. Howard!
A clear illustration of what ' real' music consists of and also of true understanding of the score. My music Mistress always stressed " only play what the composer has written!" I understand her now, aided by Mr Howard!
Excellent lecture on performance practice as it pertains to Liszt’s piano sonata in b-minor. Leslie Howard makes a thorough research.
Thank you for sharing this! Leslie Howard is always full of insight!
THOUGH QUITE LENGTHY, THIS ANALYSIS BY LESLIE HOWARD IS AMAZINGLY CRITICAL TO UNDERSTANDING THE
DIFFERENCES OF PIANISTS' INTERPRETATION OF THE ACTUAL LISZT'S PURPOSE OF THE PIECE. I WISH THIS
WERE AVAILABLE FOR ALL ARTISTS ORIGINAL PURPOSES.
Wonderful explanation of one of my all-time favorite piano pieces. When played properly, it's a religious experience.
I very much appreciate his comments about the importance of carefully observing Liszt's indicated articulations. I'm alarmed at how many musicians largely ignore such nowadays. I've observed these very same issues in Liszt's Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad Nos" for organ (written in 1850, so while he was writing the piano Sonata), and find that they have a vital effect on the work's musical impact.
I too am totally beside myself. Top pianists make so many mistakes. I play all the pieces and study everything
I don’t understand what he’s talking about because I’m musically illiterate. I’m like a child staring at stars and galaxies and supernovas but I’m not a physicist. I’ve listened to lots of classical music over the years and listening to the pros talk about the music never stops amazing me.
You have hit all the points! I finally decided to take on this piece a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to wait until next year, but I'm very pleased with the progress. And by the way, I'm one of those players who play the low B the second time around during the theme/motif, I love the dramatic sensation it adds.
I (obviously) don't play this piece. I've been enjoying the way he talks about this for 5 minutes at a time over a couple of weeks.
"bad habits that have grown like barnacles all over this work" :-)
I agree with him saying how some of the concert pianists play this piece too fast, such as how Valentina plays it. She's extremely talented, and I sure don't know how to play the piece as fast as she can without stumbling. But for the listeners, faster is not always automatically better. To really hear the beauty of this Sonata, it needs to be played around a certain speed, not too slow or too fast, and it needs to have the right feeling and touch to really sound great and melodic. Too fast starts to blurr that sound.
34:30 -34:40 - I find a kind of soft beauty in this section that he begins to play. It's slow, simple, and soft, and doesn't need to be otherwise because it then wouldn't have the same style of soft romantic beauty to it if played differently. It's the section which lasts until the part he begins playing at 34:41.
35:38 - this is only my opinion: this is only part of this sonata repeated twice completely identically because this is the one renouned tune in B minor which officially helps make this the Sonata in B minor. I've simply called it the piece's main B minor melody.
41:05 - definitely is a reprise from earlier in the piece, except on B major instead of D major. Numerous parts of the "third movement" do that, copy from the "first movement" either in a semi-altered way and/or on a different key.
42:21 - 42:31 - right after these bars, the section that begins directly afterwards is almost a complete duplicate of a section in the "first movement", the only change is the key it's played on. It being so similar is likely why he decided to completely skip talking about it and go right to the presto part near the end.
46:02 - I like that part of you really hearing the piece softly winding down. He plays it slightly faster though than I've heard the other pianists play it.
48:20 - those slow low single descending notes are similar to the slow low descending notes at the end of the middle section of the sonata. One recording I heard of this piece ended the sonata there and didn't play those last beautiful chords, I think that was a mistake.
50:25 - 50:48 - I agree, I too love those last soft higher up chords. They make the very end of this piece sound like a beautiful floating spirit rising up into the sky. And, perhaps it is the same spirit which was floating around during the section of the middle slow movement that he begins playing at 34:30
When Leslie Howard talks Liszt, you listen.
This is great. I love the sound of that piano, absolutely incredible!
I was wondering:what is the made of the piano???Exquisite sound or is it due to the accoustics in his house??
Thank you so much for this very clear lecture Mr. Leslie Howard!
After studying the Liszt Sonata for so long now I finally understand how to play this piece especially concerning tempo and articulation.
THANK YOU !!!
30:14 ‘the tricky bit is HOW to spread it’
*Looks at camera
*Winks
balls
I know this Sonata very well. Just like in Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, and Tschaikovsky's "5th Symphony", Liszt's "B Minor Sonata" focuses also on cyclic form in its themes' usages. 4-6 or 7 motives are used within the whole sonata, and each of the reprises or reinstatements of these motives try to make this 30-minute-or-so sonata unified in its thematic concepts.
The final measures of the Sonata, if I were Hans von Bulow describing this, would be like this....
"A certain man is bedridden and told that he is going to succumb to tuberculosis". The final low-octave restatements of the 1st theme represents the man's final breaths, and then, the chaplain (on the low pedal point C, then, the A minor/F major/B chord sequence), touches the moribund patient's hand and does his final-rite prayer on him, and the patient smiles at him. Eventually, the patient's face goes down to the side for the last time and never breathes again (the lone low B note), indicating that he is now pronounced dead."
I am such a fan of this great and brilliant human being. I first learned of him many, many years ago when I was searching for decent recordings of Les préludes - one of my favorite works from when I was in high school. Once I found Leslie Howard's rendition it immediately became my favorite; all orchestral performances of that romantic opus paled in comparison - in my mind anyway. I am absolutely thrilled to be listening to the man speak. He is as classy yet down to earth as I had hoped. BTW - It is so cool that his Guinness Book of World Records award is displayed beneath that famous Liszt photo (5:34 and many other times as well). Love it! :-)
This is the coolest channel on UA-cam!! I thought this channel would only exist for me in Heaven.
Great explanation of the work by Maestro Howard. Love the Lisztiana in the background!
I now understand that Liszt's opens up this Sonata by making the so-called 3rd relationship as frequently used in Romantic classical music theory. The key center actually starts in roughly G minor in the "piano" section (first 5 bars), and then, in that first explosive tirade, the rage-filled fortissimo in the G octaves, he transitions through the diminished chords (roughly leading to the vii07) finally to the B minor key center when we get into measure 12.
Bravo, Leslie!
Thank you Sir, for a wonderful demonstration. I'm sure my future enjoyment of the Sonata will be much enhanced by your interesting video.
The master speaks. It was Leslie who persuaded me to do the very thing that he recommends here, first to study the Gosses Konzertsolo. To those who are critical of Leslie's own performance of the sonata I say, meet the man and hear him live. An extremely impressive person in every respect.
Great lecture, a very comprehensive guide to this masterpiece! I wonder what Mr. Howard has to say about Klindworth's D-natural on the last page (mm. 738 and 740). All editions print those measures with D-sharp as the top note, but Karl Klindworth has assured an editor once that Liszt himself told him to play the top not of those two chords (mm. 738 and 740) as D-natural instead of D-sharp. Arthur Friedheim, who gave the premiere recording of the piece, played the chord with D-natural, but only the second chord; I don't remember other recordings that use D-natural in those spots.
There is at least one.
@@gerardbedecarter Do you happen to know which one? I have a copy of Bärenreiter, Henle study score, and Dover's reprint of Breitkopf&Härtel, and none of them contains Klindworth's D-natural; I've also looked up all editions in IMSLP, but didn't find it either. Dover's reprint does mention it in their editorial notes, though.
"Very easy, very sloppy, and in the end its thoroughly bad" Leslie criticizing common performances :)
That comment stood out for me too! As if - 'In the end, its bad' wouldn't be enough... no no, it's thoroughly bad! haha
thank you so much for this amazing video, thanks to Dr Howard for taking the time to share his expertise, let's hope there will be more
If he were a Hogwarts professor, he'd definitely be in Slytherin.
Whilst I have enormous respect for Leslie and appreciate that it can be fascinating to intricately study the scores of frequently performed masterpieces and examine the discrepancies between the composer's "intentions" and artistic "liberties", if every pianist only ever "parroted" what what written in the manuscript, there would be very little reason for progressive generations of virtuosi to interpret these works, other than to demonstrate the benefits offered by state of the art recording technology.
If accepting his claim at 11:26, Brendel, Argerich, Kissin, Zimmerman, Horowitz, Barere, Pollini, Katsaris, Richter, Lisitsa, Gilels, Yundi Li, Bolet, Yuja Wang, Arrau, Curzon, Pletnev, Cziffra, Hamelin, Rubenstein, Freire and Berezovsky, are all "sloppy" and "thoroughly bad"....sorry but....!
There is plenty of ways to interpretate a piece without changing the text.
Of course everybody has the right to play whatever he wants, but if someone deliberately puts his own taste in front of the composer's intention is just a Liberace.
We don't know if all the pianists you cited had a correct edition.
Besides that; the fact that you was trying to demonstrate your point "ab auctoritate" says it all about its validity
@@cesarecherchi6617 Or Liszt, who was notorious for adding extra notes and speeding and slowing passages. I think we should differentiate a performance of the piece in it's original intention and an individual interpretation
@@8beef4u He wasn't notorious for "adding notes and speeding and slowing passages", in fact a lot of witnesses of its Beethoven Concertos in Weimar reports the exact opposite. I have no idea of where you got your informations...
Yes if they did it as he said then they are sloppy, they’re not gods and they don’t dig for every little thing in the piece.
You are not allowed to change the text, you can change the interpretation sure, but straight up changing the author’s intentions is forbidden, if you want to do that then write your own piece
Regarding his "sloppy" and "thoroughly bad" comment, I think this refers specifically to the parts where this motive appears (with this specific articulation), not necessarily that a performance is thoroughly bad *just* because they didn't obey that one specific instruction (it also seems just part of his characteristically witty humour, we shouldn't take this too personally).
Ultimately, though, Howard does not call for people to play the text in the same way - this is impossible, given that even the same pianist might play this same piece with a different piano and in a different hall, which by default will alter, to a certain degree, how the pianist approaches certain passages (for instance, in a place with too much natural reverb, one should use less pedal than they normally would). I believe that his main goal here is that, to use your words, pianists don't always "parrot" what other pianists do in their recordings; in other words, to not put one's ego before the piece, and to examine the text critically, rather than mindlessly accepting "traditions" that - at times - completely contradict what's written in the text. For instance, in the "Recitativo" section Howard refers to at around 27:50, quite a lot of pianists take the "liberty" to """interpret""" this section in complete contradiction to the actual text, by playing both recitative phrases extremely soft - something that can only be explained by the fact that they heard someone playing this passage soft and decided to "parrot" it, rather than looking at the 'forte' indication in Liszt's original text. There's nothing wrong with listening to recordings for inspiration, but one should exercise caution when doing so.
Unlike what Mr. Howard is saying at 22:00, the last note after the triplet is joined by a slur both times in this section in my edition. In his edition, they are separated. I don't see anything wrong with playing these a little more legato. They don't always have to be played the same way.
Listen to Mr. Howard's ideas to rejuvenate your interpretation, but do not get mired down by his opinions. His opinions are rebukes meant for lazy uncritical thinking students. If you are watching this lecture, you are likely not one of them.
If you understand the work compositionally and structurally: the work is mostly derived from three thematic statements that interact and transform one another to tell a very compelling unspoken story within a large structural frame, you are good to go.
leslie howard is a genius and the only pianist to record the entire liszt repertoire
why am i here? i still learning liebestraume 3.
People will probably slate me when/if reading this... But I think that all aspiring pianists should set their goals high. Go for it! Try learning it. If you start to learn a piece with the intention of completely mastering it, I believe that any piece is possible.
And from my own experience, attempting a piece as difficult as this (as a lot of Liszt's works are!) makes other pieces that are less involved/demanding seem easier. Don't limit yourself :)
Much more difficult than consolation 1.
@@JR-xm5sz careful though, forcing yourself to learn a piece that's way above your level can be very frustrating. I know how it feels.
FirstGentleman1 much easier yea I learned the first one but my favorite is probably the 5th
31:59 Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Variation XVIII
Fabulous scholarship, and similarly beautiful wallpaper.
This is outstanding! Thank you for sharing
this guy made a studio recording of every single piano work composed by Liszt...beastly
Great video! But I wonder if claiming this is "wrong" by arguments like "this is not an introduction" or "there are only 3 tempi" is too strong I think in music there is indeed a lot if structure, but there is also so much beyond logic. And for luck pianists play the piece quite differently. I am happy for both Gilels and Zimerman.
I've watched this video about half a dozen times in the last three years since I found it.
Looks like ole Leslie has still an axe to grind after all these years -- he has never really got over being kicked out of AC/DC.
I was hoping for a grand review filled with colourful opinions and interpretations of this masterpiece for what it is. Not a THIS is how you should play this piece video.
Friedrich Hueppe Leslie Howard is not just any old “concert pianist”. He has recorded on CD every Liszt composition extant:a multi decade long undertaking consisting in 94 discs which resulted in the Guinness Book record for length of a record set.
You missed the point of the video. This book is actually edited by him.
Exactly! You got something of much more value: an expert's guide on how to correctly play this piece, and not be misguided from other people's arbitrary decisions, quite often going against the composer's indications, placed very carefully in the score.
Some aspects of his lecture do sound as though he intended to say, in your words, "THIS is how you should play the piece", but I don't think it's quite the case here. Rather, he is pointing to the fact that, while there's no problem in listening to other recordings for interpretation, we should exercise critical thinking when looking at the original text, and - most importantly - not put one's ego before the piece itself.
Would love to take a master class with you!! This was wonderful insight thank you SO MUCH!!!
brachaleba I know this comment is a bit late, but if you send a video of your playing to him on Facebook, he might respond with some feedback.
I don't agree with all your points but I mist say you are a pleasure to listen to
Very great analysis by Mr. Howard, but in the end, a pianist can do whatever he wants or feels like is right. After all, Liszt and most other composers were pianists (or whatever instrument they played), and I'm sure they performed a piece however they felt. You're supposed to make the piece your own.
Ludwig van Beethoven I agree.
Sure, if you want to settle for a sentimental mess instead of Liszt's vision. By the way, the book is actually edited by him so I think it makes sense for him to talk about editorial details.
WolfPsx While this is true, a pianist should not just take every written thing literally. After all, they are sort of like suggestions. I’m sure Liszt overly interpreted many works since he was a great virtuoso and that was the popular thing to do in those days. The pianist should add some of their thoughts into the piece as well.
WolfPsx In the end it doesn’t even matter that much what he wrote. The goal of music is to make people happy or sad or what ever it might be. The goal is to make music sound as good as possible and not to play every single detail as if you were working on something mechanical. After all music is an art. Of course there is lots of work behind every piece but in the End you want to touch the soul of every one in the audience. Nobody will care after if you played that group of notes just like Liszt asked. By the way literally nobody plays the sonata like he suggests here. He, Leslie Howard himself doesn’t even follow some of his tips.
@@classicalmusiclover4029 Fair enough, everyone has their own opinion. I personally find great composers such as Liszt way more interesting than any interpreter, even though I'm one myself. I'm not talking about absolutes here, of course there's always personal shaping, but I think following the score exactly with things like phrasing of the main themes and tempi usually makes the result more powerful, structured and easier to listen to.
I wonder about Liszt expecting a pianist to pedal in the first part where there are no markings. If he can put a tempo marking at the beginning and end of the piece, but not in the middle because if he wanted that way he would have, then pedal markings should be thought of in the same way. Debussy heard Liszt play in Rome and said he was surprised by how little pedal he used.
Thank you for this. I’m not qualified to suggest which modern performance adheres to the manuscript more than others, but I suspect it wouldn’t be the most inspired or rewarding one. 🧛♂️
great video. now: what is the piece Liszt wrote before the sonata mentioned after one minute mark?
Grosses Konzertsolo, S.176
Most interesting. Many thanks.
very useful...many thanks
Hello Mr. Howard , What is the name of the Liszt piano composition that you said precedes the musical style of The Piano Sonata in B Minor, S178 ? Thank you very much for presenting this lecture.
Liszt's Grosses Konzertsolo, S176
I have never played the sonata, but I can imagine how frustrating some of the passages in it could be.
Let’s say 99-83% or higher
I don't know of any sonata that touched me more deeply - together with William Byrd's motet "Aspice Domine", published in 1575,
or Keith Jarrett's Part II of his legendary improvised (!) Cologne Concert on Friday January 24th, 1975 ,
as well as several works by J.S.Bach that cannot be listed here,
it belongs to the musical summit works for which I am infinitely grateful ...
FRANZ LISZT: Die h-moll-Sonate (1849-1853) S.178
(The Piano Sonata in b-minor) :
ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtzF7zFf5JvJJOSp9y1RsLqd.html
FRANZ LISZT (1811 - 1886) : Cantando espressivo (- Sonate in h-moll,1853)
ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtyPK9citStePeuqbll7N3sp.html
FRANZ LISZT (1811 - 1886): Fuge - Allegro energico ( - Sonate in h-moll , 1853)
ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtzeF_BAxDxCwLq0JNY6oZJl.html
WILLIAM BYRD (1543-1623) :
Aspice Domine ( 1575 - Cantiones Sacrae )
ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtxq6702G-rEfPMqEQxmmvL2.html
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert
Freitag, 24.Januar 1975
ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtyZiffPkwaIsTMaWQtIdzrL.html
FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886): Au Lac Du Wallenstadt (Années de pèlerinage - Première année: Suisse, S. 160)(1848-1854)
ua-cam.com/play/PLfdMKJMGPPtybv9SpIsP0MtDIkX3urBUF.html
A commanding presentation.
Outstanding.
Very useful and interesting lecture, thank you!
I just listened to his recording of this soanta, it seems like he pretty much never followed his own advice with regards to pedalling and articulation.
I have the same question as well.
Somone help. What other piece was he talking about at the 1:11 mark? I couldn't understand what he said. I tried searching up random things that sounded similar but had no luck.
Liszt - Grosses Konzertsolo, S176
Leslie is cool. Very few people talk about Liszt that well. Fascinating to see the MS edition. And I'm just curious, who was this fellow that stretched the Sonata to 47 minutes? :-)
Valery Afanassiev's is the longest interpretation I have, (and that I know of). His is is 42 minutes long! I must say it is an interesting approach. Certainly not on my list of favorites, but preferable to many of the, "have notes, will play" empty virtuoso versions we hear from younger players, (too young to play the Liszt Sonata in the first place IMO) today.
That would be Pogorelich
I think he is rather ill - and it sounds like it in that recording. I am not in anyway mocking him but having been to a concert of his a couple of years ago at hte Festival Hall I am worried that he is actually being exploited. If he isn;t ill I genuinely wonder he deliberately playing a way to see how far he can push it before nobody claps - at the RFH (a truly awful experience) he looked genuinely surprised when people clapped.
47 minutes? I need at least 2 hour and 47 minutes... :D
@Mr Kitrid yes
One of the most indispensable videos I've seen on Liszt's music. Riveting!
LISZT FERENC was an hungarian🇭🇺 patriot...I love his music❤🤍💚
you must get a lot of the actor leslie howard's fans into liszt
Thank you maestro!
Anton,Liszt,Percy❤
I respect this guys’s wisdom and knowledge on this sonata, but a performance with that strict of a tempo and zero implementation of the performer’s own liberty to make this piece his/her own will leave this piece devoid of any emotion or soul. What you will have is a “perfect” copy where the stiff necked performer cares only for the accuracy of the interpretation.
The romantic era was primarily about the performer. Remember that Liszt himself added his own preferences to the pieces of Chopin and others he admired.
You dont want to change the piece tho
I don't agree. The Liszt Sonata is not your composition. It was created at a specific moment in time, inspired by very specific events etc., and the work is as such a result of all that. To recreate it exactly accordingly the composer's indications is the most difficult thing to do as it requires the complete elimination of your ego. If you devote your time 100% to the composer's expressions, there is no room for personal mannerisms. They simply disappear.
You have to access the templates of the music itself instead of imposing your own mannerisms-templates that would serve only to divorce you from the musical content. You serve as a "channel."
What I mean is:I recently listened to 4 pianists playing the Bb Schubert Posthumous Sonata..score in hand.Radu Lupu, Alfred Brendel, Rudolf Serkin and Sviatoslav Richter.All of them followed meticulously Schubert's indications...yet they all sounded unique.
But it would be interesting to learn which changes and personal touches you would ad to improve on the original.
Let me ask you: Would you ad some brushstrokes or paint on Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa"?
Respectfully.
Ya I disagree as well. If you play an instrument serious then you should know copying the exact interpretation becomes a natural part of you when your learning and feels exactly natural in hearing it as a listener, it would never sound unnatural like you would hear in sight reading.
@@thepianocornertpc I agree with your general idea, but since musical notation is a limited and more or less primitive way of reflecting the composers intentions, the notation is sort of an instruction to put the work of art together again in a dynamic process of creation. That leaves a lot of freedom for the artist. In that respect it is totally different from a painting which is a finished and static thing. If Da Vinci would make another Mona Lisa, it would be different. In fact many panters revisit a motif often and the respective paintings are often very differing, although they tried to recreate the same idea in every one of them. When we hear composers perform their own work, we are not seldom very surprised to hear all kinds of unexpected differences between their interpretation and what we would have expected according to the score alone. It is not a mathematical process. To one composition there belongs perhaps only one "best" score, but in the reverse engineering there appear many "best" performances of it.
@@paulmetdebbie447 I beg to disagree. The argument "limited or more or less primitive way of notation" doesn't hold really. For more than 300 years, composers had enough time, opportunities and their genius to improve on the notation system ..if needed. Given the wealth of incredible beautiful creations notated,with accordingly you a primitive system, they didn't seem to feel the need to do that. I find our notation system ingenious, clever, far-reaching with endless possibilities for permutations etc. The immense output of musical creations is testimony to that. Just take any Debussy Prelude or Scriabin Poeme or Sonata to see the countless indications of what these composers exactly wanted. To see the relationships of all these parameters in a Liszt Sonata requires obviously greater observational skills and well-developed cognitive powers. The great Walter Gieseking once said that reading and contemplating a score is the most difficult thing to do because our immense ego immediately wants to interfere. Also, Michelangeli told me something similar. A very Zen-like thought. To observe and UNDERSTAND the intricate relationships between the myriad dynamic indications and note-profile is unfortunately beyond most of us.
The Mona Lisa argument is false. Any composition was created at a very specific moment in time as the result of psychological fluctuations. A painting ..a symphony, a Sonata, a Prelude and Fuga..it doesn't matter. Both, a painting or a score are "static" as long as one doesn't touch it or activates it. Liszt composed another Sonata..the Dante Sonata, a completely different narrative and story..obviously it's different from the Sonata in B Minor. So would be "another " Mona Lisa. But...why paint another Mona Lisa? Da Vinci never did so.
Your quote: When you hear composers perform their own works...etc? Which composers? Rachmaninov? Ok..listen to him, score in hand, playing his own concerti...not one time he changes his own dynamics!
What other composers-recordings are you referring to? Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann? The only thing we have from them is the score and mostly overly-sentimental accounts of biased admirers.
I repeat: I recently listened to Schubert's B Flat Posthumous Sonata played by 4 different pianists..Richter, Radu Lupu, Serkin and Alfred Brendel in hand....all of them followed the scored and obliged meticulously Schubert's indications. Yet, they all sounded different! Keep in mind they did not alter anything.
IMHO it all depends on the cognitive powers and abilities of the performer or better, mediator. Only those who are capable to eliminate their ego, or at least keep it at bay, are capable of doing justice to the score at hand. many present-day performers show an astounding lack of these much-needed qualities. Oh yes! technical wizardry "a volonte" but ..something is missing.
Nog een prettige dag verder.😉
Amazing video, thank you so much ! What recorded version of the Sonata would be closer to Liszt's original writing in your opinion ?
Mr Howard's of course!
chrish12345
Sadly, I don't think it's on youtube.
Anthonia M
I've always liked the Brendel live performance from Japan, I think that's still on youtube and it is also bound to be based on thorough research.
About articulation - it's why I find Mozart so incredibly useful to play. His music is virtually driven entirely by articulation, and learning it well and properly is extremely useful for just about all other music for piano.
Good to know! I'm so ashamed that i didn't articulate right untill today!
Hello! I have become interested since 17 years old to learn compositions and I have seen that many times performances aren't quite on the spot with what the composers intended. Especially with composers like Chopin and Liszt. And that makes me want to play the compositions myself instead of listening to them being performed. For example, nocturne op. 15 no. 2 the doppio movimento section.
Everything that Dr. Howard have said in this lecture makes sense but one thing makes me wonder. The triplets that were supposed to be apart and Dr. Howard says that most of the time they are played sloppy. I can't understand that since if I were to play it that way, it would be 5 quick notes in succession with the 4-th one skipped (sorry, not good in terminology).
14:43 Is he referring to Pogorelić...?
Most likely lol - there is a live recording of Pogorelic playing Liszt's Sonata on YT (among a few other versions), and it is 49 minutes long (and does get quite boring after a while). His version of Brahms's Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2 is quite interesting, also much slower than how the average performer plays it. For certain pieces, a noticeably slower tempo can be a good alternative to bring certain aspects of the composition that otherwise might be lost in a faster rendition, but I don't think this works at all with a piece like Liszt's Sonata.
@@ArielMagno91 Really? Pogorelic? Well he has a performance of the Chopin Sonata in B minor that lasts 36 minutes, so maybe it's believable that he has a Liszt Sonata performance over 45 minutes. ;)
@@bergeronscores605 There's a recording of that performance on YT, a live performance from 2012, the video is 49:14 long. He did make a studio recording of it, which clocks at just under 34 minutes - definitely more tasteful than the live performance, but still not quite my cup of tea. Some of my favorite renditions of Liszt's Sonata (available on YT at least) include Martha Argerich's famous recording (the first one I ever heard of this piece), Nelson Freire's live performance at University of Maryland (quite an impressive rendition, especially for a live performance), and Krystian Zimerman's studio recording for Deutsche Grammophon - the greatest dilemma for a performer is to find the balance between faithfulness to the score/composer's intentions and personal expression/freedom, and I think Zimerman strikes an almost perfect balance between them (as he does in almost everything he plays, in my opinion).
Fantastic video thanks
Love this man
At 47:45 did Liszt know about the middle pedal? Wouldn't it be useful there?
A genius talking about a genius!
The way he doesn't play the triplet joined in the main theme, the triplet loses its rhythm and becomes two 64ths and one 32nds. So what's more important, the articulation, or the rhythm???
I think Dr Howard means something like this: imaging 'cellos playing the A to D sweep at bars 13/14 as a crescendo glissando all in one down bow and know that it should not sound like that on the piano. It is not intended to be a harrumph! or 'clearing the throat' noise. Then imagine the 'cellos articulating the triplet on an up bow and playing the D on a down bow. The figure becomes 'melodic'. We might conclude that if this difference in delivery cannot be discerned, the tempo is too fast?
If it is still triplet, the last note is not very important, I think.
Not to mention the fact that Howard's demonstrated triplet takes the space of an 8th note, rather than a 16th note as in the score. The result is that it sounds rhythmically equal to the repeated 8th notes that follow, which has a clear effect on the motivic shape.
At any reasonable tempo, the triplet 32nd notes (especially in that bass register) will be indistinct. Howard's insistence on the separation of the end of the slur becomes silly. There's simply not enough time!
What is the piece he mentions at 1:13?
Liszt - Grosses Konsertsolo, S176
VERY interesting.
Incredible artist. Hope David Mitchell plays him one day.
Anton Wills-Eve
1 second ago
Oddly I would put Yuja Wang's performance way out on its own of all the 37 pianists I have heard play the sonata in the last 60 or so years. But why? Leslie is a fine pianist, his Liszt rhapsody no 10 was even a 'must hear' for university students in the UK in the 70's and 80's. But this music is what in Italian we call an 'aggiornamento', or modern, updated version of anything. Pope St.John XX111 even used it as his reason for summoning the second Vatican Council - ie to bring the Church up to date in the modern world. Well, be honest now, has anybody else in the last 10 years updated this sonata more emotionally and penetratingly to the mind than Yuja Wang? For me the answer is no. For everything else discussed or commented above, all I can say is 'I know what I Iike, and I like it when I hear it'. The great thing about this sonata is that not even the composer knew what people were going to hear, think and enjoy when they heard it. So, for Liszt's sake, we must bow to the aggiornamento of this wonderful out-pouring of his soul in musical terms, and hope that our present day pianists are trying to do the same. Yuja Wang is!! I can't wait to hear if Ju-Hee Lim will produce some equally novel performance.
Anton Wills-Eve
Il y a 1 seconde
Bizarrement je mettrais la performance de Yuja Wang à l'écart de tous les 37 pianistes que j'ai entendus jouer de la sonate ces 60 dernières années. Mais pourquoi? Leslie est un bon pianiste, sa rhapsodie n ° 10 de Liszt était même un «must» pour les étudiants universitaires au Royaume-Uni dans les années 70 et 80. Mais cette musique est ce que l'on appelle en italien un aggiornamento, ou une version moderne et actualisée de tout. Le pape JeanXX111 l'a même utilisé comme raison pour convoquer le deuxième Concile du Vatican, c'est-à-dire pour mettre l'Église à jour dans le monde moderne. Eh bien, soyez honnête maintenant, est-ce que quelqu'un d'autre au cours des 10 dernières années a mis à jour cette sonate de façon plus émotionnelle et pénétrante à l'esprit que Yuja Wang? Pour moi, la réponse est non. Pour tout ce qui est discuté ou commenté ci-dessus, tout ce que je peux dire, c'est «je sais ce que j'aime, et je l'aime quand je l'entends». Ce qui est bien avec cette sonate, c'est que même le compositeur ne savait pas ce que les gens allaient entendre, penser et apprécier quand ils l'entendraient. Donc, pour l'amour de Liszt, nous devons nous incliner devant l'aggiornamento de cette merveilleuse sortie de son âme en termes musicaux, et espérer que nos pianistes actuels essaient de faire la même chose. Yuja Wang l'a fait !! Je ne peux pas attendre pour entendre si Ju-Hee Lim produira une performance tout aussi unique.
This sonata sounds like the piano part of a larger piano concerto, with the instrumental missing, lost, or never written out. Maybe they will show up some day some place?
Once aware of this, one can hear the missing orchestral part where there seem to be holes in the piano score. This can be discovered in the Rachmaninoff piano concertos with the orchestral part left out, ( but known)
You're full of it.
Laus Deo, beautiful!
📍33:13
This video is meant to be watched alleeegro eneeergico
I'm looking at the Liszt manuscript right now (it's available for free on IMSLP) and what I'm seeing does not match up with what Howard says about Liszt's slurs at all.