Dan Maftei

Schubert's final sonata, composed a few months before his untimely death, epitomizes the bittersweetness that marks all of his best music. Its second movement, in three parts, starts with a steady death knell that fades away into nothingness; somehow exuberantly picks itself back up from the ashes; and comes back with a fierce grit in defiance of those same knells, giving way to the calm and serenity the dying 31-year old was clearly looking for.

Or something like that, I dunno. Give me your money.

The "grande sonate pathétique" ("pathetic" as in its old sense of brimming with emotion, not "pathetic" as in yikes what is going on with this camera angle), so-named to Beethoven's liking by his publisher, is among his most enduring of compositions. Each of its three movements a right banger, from the opener's grave tumult, to the coda's frantic stillness, the second movement, shown here, has a melody so catchy it was chosen by Karl Haas as the theme to radio's widest-reaching classical program, "Adventures in Good Music". You'll even hear it in Billy Joel's "This Night" and Kiss's "Great Expectations." To paraphrase the preeminent Robert Christgau on the everlasting Louis Armstrong, it is the sort of piece that makes you wonder whether "high" and "low" mean anything at all in art (answer: they don't).

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This "simple" waltz, number 19 by some mystical counting system I've yet to decipher, was published posthumously 100 years after Chopin's death. It was almost certainly written for a pupil of his as a pedagogical exercise, pared down to the core components that make Chopin's best music so popular. This would surely appease even 15-year old Tommy Stinson, bassist of The Replacements, who in his immortal wisdom opined: "I hate music, it's got too many notes." Gratefully, there are just the right number of notes here: a pinky to ground the bass, some pads for harmony, and a memorable melody with a flourish or two for spice. We can presume this was one of the pieces Chopin explicitly wanted burned after his death as not worthy for publishing, so let's take a moment to thank the public for knowing what it wants.

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Romanticism was many things, and if principal among them was the extravagant use of exclamation marks in literature, set pieces was its counterpart in music. Inspiration is a fickle thing, so who am I to judge some Russian publicist for commissioning Tchaikovsky to write a set of pieces after the twelve months of the year, let alone Tchaikovsky for naming the overtly somber June "Barcarolle" (presumably because summer is prime time for gondola rides, somber or otherwise), or January "At the Fireplace" (because, and follow my logic closely here, January is cold). For all we know, confining scope is a great way to let inspiration flow, as hypothesized by a musing Robert Christgau on Curtis Mayfield's Superfly. Even though Tchaikovsky didn't give much thought to these pieces, which not coincidentally matches the amount of interest the public has garnered in most of them, this gem has lasted as one of piano's most cherished songs, for lay and connoisseur alike. To the dismay of rhetoricians everywhere (not all good lists come in threes), it's easy to see why: a piercing melody, backed by that ethereal Tchaikovsky touch to harmony.

Little known fact: Tchaikovsky wrote two versions of this piece, one of which he personally gave to me and me only. This is the version you're hearing today. They're not mistakes, I swear! Don't forget to subscribe for more fresh takes.

Schumann's Romantic predilections for music as a window to the meaning of life are hard to resist even for a seasoned hater such as myself, who much prefers music as aesthetic pleasure. His earnestness and unadulterated joy for all that encompasses his work -- the loftiness, the exegesis, the entire precipice of 19th century Romanticism -- is just, well, too earnest and unadulterated to taint the aesthetic pleasure that must surely have been among his many and principled goals. Träumerei, which means "Dreaming", is a prime example, both in and out of its context, a suite of pieces evoking childhood named Kinderszenen ("childhood scenes"). Evocative might well be the aptest adjective to describe the piece, leaving as it does to the listener to suss out what personal dreams are being evoked if not straight mined out of them. But much to Schumann's chagrin and perhaps only slightly to mine, who's to say why this is? The melody, catchy enough it keeps ringing in your head? The undulating harmony it floats over? The name?

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It is my firm opinion that any pianist worth their salt should be able to awe or at least put in a minor trance any rando happening upon their Bach prelude of choice. A litmus test for being able to bring out the transcendental qualities of Bach's music, if you will (and you should). Lo and behold I am not (yet) that pianist, but the seeds for what make this little piece a controlled upheaval are easy to suss in any interpretation, accomplished or otherwise: the rhythmic skips which put that driving bass in motion, the forward motion of that same bass, the undulating harmony in the right hand, the maddening breaks and drops, all holding relentlessly until the ending's major lift.

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Written at 19 but not published until after Chopin's death, and against his wishes at that, this is another example of audiences' aesthetic pleasure putting a piece in its rightful place. Imagine if it was burned as Chopin intended... I'm not sure what he didn't see in it, given his love for a singing melody, which this piece has in droves. The harmony may be simple and doesn't fritz out in the way Chopin oh so adored, but the same can be said of the D-flat major "minute" waltz, which he did deem fit to be published. Speculation is all hearsay anyways, so we should rest easy knowing the piece made it to us. Did I mention he was 19 when he wrote it? You should see what he wrote at 17 for a school project. I wonder what I was doing at 17...

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Everywhere you look you'll see this little prelude listed as one of Debussy's -- if not piano's -- easiest pieces, and it should urge you to reconsider what easy and hard mean, if anything at all. It's slow and pretty and can be played with enough pedal to saturate the entire Romantic repertoire, so sure, easy peasy chicken squeezy, but the melody is buried in rich harmonies, and teasing out the one from the other is no small task, and doing so successfully is the lifeblood of the piece. Not to mention the difficulty of not adding excessive rubato to every juicy chord change, although thankfully this is easier here than in other similar pieces.

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Ironic that while Chopin's waltzes are either too dreamy or too dreary and his mazurkas too rhythmically murky to ever answer whether they're in 2/4 or 3/4, this B-flat gem actually stays true to its name and is supremely danceable. So much so, in fact, that at some fancy ball/fête/soirée (or was it an ice cream social?), the Warsaw upper class spent an evening dancing to it "again and again", according to Chopin's sister. The simple back-and-forth between the two chords marking each waltz triple is surely why, and even when in the second part the mazurka 2/4-in-3/4 rhythm takes over momentarily, there is enough forward waltz-like momentum to keep feet moving.

Not that I ever dance to classical music. This is srs bsns and I take it very srsly. For more sobriety, please subscribe, and don't forget to leave a like!

Another gem of a miniature that Chopin did not think fit to publish, and another mazurka (like the B-flat major waltz masquerading as a "mazurka") that only briefly murks up the rhythm in the typical 3/4-or-is-it-2/4 fashion. But boy is that rhythm ever so sweet, coming out of nowhere and sliding back into a waltz without any break in the flow. Check it out at 0:11 - 0:16. The slip-shod rhythm that reintroduces the verse at the end of the 1:24 sotto voce section is another little world in itself.

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Almost all of Chopin's nocturnes are archetypal: melodic, harmonically rich, utterly swathed in pedal, and all best appreciated late on a quiet night (we're talking Elliott Smith 2:45 AM late, not doing a bedtime crossword at 9PM late). This particular nocturne was supposedly composed after seeing a production of Hamlet, and named "At the cemetery", Chopin apparently having never attended a Harold Bloom lecture on what Shakespeare was actually trying to say in Hamlet. But this account is based on an essay published some 30 years after the composer's death, and unfortunately, our Google overlords have not surfaced any corroborating information, just some basic facts (big money to whoever finds and translates Marceli Antoi Szulc's essays published in Echo Muzyczne). Such legends aside, the mood is certainly more somber than in other nocturnes, and even overtly ends in a religious state, pulling the classic starts-in-minor-ends-in-major Picardy trick so often used by Bach. Surely this signifies something??

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First, let me just leave Bach's title for this collection of musical exercises:
"Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition."
Desirous as I am of learning, the inventions are wonderful little miniatures. Perhaps more fit for personal enjoyment than for public performance, but there are aesthetic gems sprinkled throughout nonetheless, such as this invention's minor middle section. As an exercise, this is given to beginning students, focusing as it does on stringing four consecutive notes together with each hand (that's the technical study) while weaving the two melodic lines in and out of each other (that's the musical study), but as I've harped on before, easy and hard don't mean much at all when it comes to performance. Evenly stringing those four notes together over and over (and over) again, while sprinkling little rhythmic nuances throughout the melodies to keep the piece interesting, is no small beginner's task. It is, however, worth attempting from the start of your piano studies, and will keep offering you things to learn for a lifetime.

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Turina's piano suite is a collection of nifty little riffs, swiftly moving from one to the other, multiple times within a single song. That it strikes similar riffs throughout different songs to let us add fancy words like "motifs" to our discourse is interesting and all, but what is truly striking is how each collection of seemingly disparate riffs coalesces together into a not-so-disparate mood. Here, the clusters of notes that permeate what I can only assume is Turina's entire oeuvre -- if going on chronology and relative geographical location alone, he could have well seen Louis Armstrong live -- are turned into the titular yelps and growls. Although, I must admit it takes more imagination than I have to see a dog in that quiet, distant, ponderous main melody, which manages to suffuse even the loudest barks with a fairly un-doglike demeanor.

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There's something thrilling about these fast, metronomic miniatures of Bach's (see the prelude in D minor), the rhythm roaming incessantly through gorgeous harmonies. Dig, especially, those little moments where minor seconds clash in tension before release (0:20, 0:25, 0:55). This prelude would have fit right at home with the others in the Well-Tempered Clavier, musical and pedagogical as it is, but it remained unpublished until Bach's resurgence in the 1800's.

If you're wondering how much that left leg helped keep the rhythm going, the answer is that every subsequent attempt to keep it still ended with a slightly less interesting rendition. Don't forget to leave a like and subscribe for more distracting movements.

Satie claimed that the Gnossiennes were a new type of composition, free of form and rhythm, but as far as anyone can tell, the rhythm is steady and the form is nocturnal. What's really striking about them (and the Gymnopédies) is how the clash of notes between melody and harmony detract not a bit from the ethereal mood, but instead enhance it, creating a peculiar, unearthly effect devoid of the melancholy it would otherwise be akin to.

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Bach is the premier desert island composer, on par with Louis Armstrong as musician, because their oeuvre spans all known human emotion. However, mortal that he is (according to some), and mortal that we are (such as it is), there are certain moods that resonate more deeply, with us, and I suspect with him as well. This sarabande is a prime example of one such atmosphere, of deep meditation somehow free of the overreaching pathos that can otherwise mar such pieces. It's a rare talent of Bach's to elevate sobriety into a punchiness that hits deeper and cleaner than it otherwise would. Who else but Bach knew this, let alone accomplish it? Billie Holiday? Shakespeare?

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George Sand, literary as she is, misnomered this piece (in Chopin's opinion and to his supposed chagrin) by accurately pointing out that the persistent and light notes that repeat throughout resemble raindrops, which they certainly do. Despite being largely completed well before the couple's belabored trip to a Majorca monastery, her claim that Chopin's inspiration came from a particularly rainy night is emblematic romanticism, and I'll be damned if I won't call it the Raindrop Prelude for all my living days. It's a gorgeous piece that transcends bittersweetness, a surprisingly rare feat for Chopin, wallowing as he does in both notes and moodiness (in my opinion and to my chagrin, love him though I do). It's captivating throughout all its 6+ minutes, moving seamlessly through melody to pathos to bright vigor, to downtrod pathos and back to melody again, all the while maintaining that pitter patter of raindrops through its left hand Ab and right hand G#.

The Bachinator has no shortage of interesting musical ideas, adept though he is at harmony above all else (in true Baroque fashion). The climbs that start each section are beautiful, searching and gathering momentum to a peak that then falls naturally with equal drive into the core of the piece. I believe the academics call this a neat-o effect. Although this is one of those French suite movements that actually does work as the dance piece they are all claimed to be, Bach, like all great artists, transcends genre, and a freer interpretation works just as well, bringing out the little moments of nuanced harmony more clearly.

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Another minor key waltz from Chopin, another nocturne in practice. It's possible to play this with a constant if lilting waltz rhythm, but then again, just about anything is possible, even if it's not the sharpest idea. I prefer swaying in and out of said rhythm, which does risk a little seasickness, admittedly. But it's hard not to give in to the bursts of Romantic harmonies that permeate all three of this piece's distinct sections. Speaking of distinct sections, this is a prime example of why Gould called Chopin a "bad" composer. Even I tend to prefer the Beatles songs that integrate seamlessly between verse and chorus, which this waltz certainly does not. So it goes: it's a small price to pay for such beautiful moments.

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I've been in a state of perpetual shock ever since I first read that Bach's French suites are collections of dance music, which shock re-sparked in full by every collection, musing, or literature that says the same thing, which is all of them. It's not that I can't envision Bach making dance music, he's got plenty of that, which, played by someone with rhythm, so, maybe not classical musicians, gets my feet and body moving (for example, many of his liverier Well-Tempered Clavier preludes). It's that I can't imagine anyone dancing to somber minor key pieces, like this one, even if played in a steadier rhythm amenable to dancing. I've since noticed that some interpretations of some of the movements of some of the French suites can, in fact, be quite danceable, but this dirge of a piece is not one of them. As I've pointed out before, one of Bach's qualities (quirks?) among his sadder pieces is their peculiar distance, which keeps them on whatever immortal plane he sourced them from, human but alienated, morose but contemplative, the effect being less teenage melodrama (which is the usual sad-sack fare of sad pieces) and more mindful ruminating. Reminds me of Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's sonnets, of which he pointed out that it seems like someone else is describing the author's deep pain. I'm not sure this is such a piece, so revel in the melodrama.

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This is a peculiar mazurka considering how often the downbeat is missing. More standard is the rubato I am clearly infatuated with, which is let all the more loose given those missing downbeats. Many Chopin pieces bear Liszt in mind (to paraphrase): "Chopin's rubato is like trees blowing in the wind: the leaves sway freely, but the trunk stays still," the leaves being the melody and the trunk being the left hand rhythm. To be fair, Mozart was doing this to Viennese awe almost half a century earlier, but it's an extra spicy thought in Romantic-era music. This rhythmic balance is by far the hardest thing to nail in this piece, but the ethereal mood carries it through just about any interpretation.

This is the first recording in which I've incorporated microphones. The sound mixing is basic and the best is yet to come, but overall I'm happy with how it sounds.

Bless Keith Snell, editor of the Neil A. Kjos Music Company's introductory volume of Grieg lyric pieces, for picking out this little gem. A note in the preface from Grieg: "It is not for me to build lofty places and mighty cathedrals of music, but rather cottages, in which men may dwell and rest their hearts" (girls not allowed, natch). Niels Gade was 19-year old Grieg's teacher at Copenhagen, and after re-watching The Wire, my newly-minted detective's intuition tells me this piece was named in his honor. It is indeed a beautiful little cottage of a piece, calm and serene, fitting for a collection titled "Lyric Pieces," to which Grieg added volume after volume throughout his whole life.

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This is another lyrical piece from Grieg, in a slightly different mode than last week's "Gade". Still a cottage of a song, this is more nocturnal, dreamier. The 2-against-3 rhythm must be kept up by the right hand alone, all the trickier since, as in all Romantic music, the melody (in 2) ought to flow freely and expressively while the rhythm (in 3) ought to stay steady.

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Bach's Italian Concerto was, if the narrator to Glenn Gould's "On the Record" is anyone to go by -- and why not -- played by every young pianist in middle-class suburbia. I find this odd, as the third movement is fast and (excuse me) melody-less, the first is much more difficult than it lets on, amazing though it is, and the second is, well, as you can hear here, weird as all hell. Bach had a talent for opening a piece with a bizarre base on top of which he adds a melody that pulls everything together (see the second movement to the keyboard Concerto in D minor for an extreme example). I for one find that this melody has a bittersweet pull on me, as I play it, if not always as I listen to it, but whether playing or listening, the resolutions that end each of this piece's two halves are peak Bach, apotheosis if you will -- and why wouldn't you. The meandering harmony and melody coalesce into something extraordinarily beautiful, hopeful in the first half's major resolution, lost in the second's minor. I could listen to them for days.

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In a later French printing a month after the first, Chopin ditched the stylistic "Marche (funèbre)", un-characteristic as it was of him to have added it in the first place, but the title stuck, not just through the German and English editions, but through the piece itself, inexorably grave from rhythm through melody. Somber would be putting it lightly, as somber implies something like a meditative state. This is decidedly more unpleasant, stressful even, if it weren't for the curious break in the middle that by all sense and reasoning doesn't seem to belong. I have no doubt stiches like this are one of the primary reasons why Glenn Gould called Chopin (and basically everyone who isn't Bach) a "bad" composer, but Gould was not much of an aesthete, whereas I, like all spiritually impoverished folk, simply want to hear something pretty and moving. Amidst something oppressive and deathly still, apparently.

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This is the be-all end-all of Chopin nocturnes, if not Chopin pieces. Probably his most famous, certainly so for lay listeners (as we all should be), it is peak pop music, all melody and harmony, singable, hummable, gorgeous ear-worm of a dance, slow or waltzing as fits the mood and interpretation. It is atypical of Chopin's other nocturnes in just how downright pleasant it is, although it works well as late-night fare like the others. Free of both moroseness and the awkward tendency to fritz out aharmonically with altogether too many notes, I for one don't think Chopin topped it in its genre, despite being just 21 when he composed it.
One of Chopin's students, Wilhelm von Lenz, wrote that students were instructed to play the left hand accompaniment with two hands, to reach a perfectly-paced -- that is, not triplets -- and quiet interpretation, and only after mastering that, to try and do the same with just the left hand, before finally adding in the melody. This reaches to the heart of the piece, which must be grounded well in bass harmony. My biggest issue has always been the difficult span of pinky on G natural, pointer on E-flat, where the harmony must lead with that E-flat. Too often, the E-flat gets buried.

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This "lento in the manner of a nocturne", as described by Chopin's sister, was composed when the expat Chopin was just 20, and never published, instead sent home as what I like to think was a gift of goodwill and remembrance from a brother who would never return home to Poland. It's unclear why Chopin never published it, but then again, many of his most now-famous pieces never were. It's certainly not the dreary mood, that was never an issue, so perhaps it was its simplicity, which it shares with his unpublished waltz in A minor. Both pieces float a beautiful right hand melody over a consistently grounded (and beautiful) left hand harmony, free of the note-heavy freakouts that Thurston Moore probably listens to on vinyl, and of which Chopin was, I assume, given how often he threw them about, proud of. I personally dig this piece because of its three different little movements, seamlessly integrated in a way that would make the Beatles proud, and for its little moments of pathos, brimming out of nowhere and dimming out as quick as they came.

Although a "beginner's" piece, there are few things more difficult to master than pianissimo trills and delicato flurries of scales. I'm doing my best, I swear! Don't forget to subscribe and leave a like for more exclamatory remarks.

I've recently come to understand that while these "french" suites are certainly influenced by old dance music, and while certainly poppier than the "english" suites or the partitas, they are not dance music per-se. So I really ought to get off the soapbox I've been on for the previous french suite pieces I've posted. That said, this 5th suite, easily the most played and renown, is also easily the most danceable. The key is in the flowing rhythms and heavy downbeats, as well as in each piece's identifiable dance influence. The allemande, stately and introductory (or pompous and aristocratic if you ramp it up as such), is in danger of being played too fast, like the subsequent courante. Reigning in that speed to get the right mood was the hardest part of this interpretation, not counting the trills, which, being trills, are by definition Brian Eno, whereas I, to paraphrase Bill Callahan's "A Hit", am yet but Gary Numan (no offense to Gary Numan).

This is the first recording to be done entirely via mics, without my Clavinova's internal soundboard. It seems to suit pedal-less music better. For more technical progress, please leave a like and subscribe!