Lesson 114 - Learning the piano parts

Today, we looked at Beethoven's Sonata (No.2 in G minor, Op.5) together; a long piece that demands stamina from the cellist.

One of (many) challenges in playing a piece such as this is not decaying into a death rattle ~ where a section or phrase of music stops abruptly before the next one begins. Like. Reading. A. Sentence. This. Way.

Deryn's advice was to keep the pace slow, never rushed but with phrasing and ending in mind; give the playing of that phrase a purpose, if you will.

I read today about a 'parlando' style of playing, an attribute attached to Casals and an unfamiliar term I had to look up. It suddenly occurred to me that after "finding my cello voice", the next step was to "use the voice to tell a story".

Of course! Looking at it now, it seemed so obvious. It wasn't then. Not to me. I saw it as this huge hill that I had to climb and because the hill was so huge, I wasn't able to see the other hill after it.

In any case, technical notes to remember - 144bpm semiquaver, 72bpm quaver as per practise accompanist.

We then talked about a possible pianist to accompany my playing this piece. Maybe someone in Bradford?



Something else I needed to do was learn the piano parts by listening to as many recordings of the piece by as many different cellists as possible, with the main score in hand. So if a pianist isn't possible, at least I can play with a recorded accompanist without visual clues.

I brought an old score of the piece that I found in a charity shop a year ago. It was fun comparing it with the modern one Deryn has. The main takeaway from this exercise was that Urtext fingerings, slurs and bowings sometimes need replacing!