Piano Street - piano sheet music
October 11, 2008, 05:10:37 AM *
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
   Forum Home   Help Search  

There are currently 2 users in the Piano Street chat rooms! Welcome in!
Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Chopin C-major Prelude - rhythms  (Read 155 times)
getcool
PS Gold Member
Newbie
*****
Offline Offline

Posts: 24


« on: August 06, 2007, 02:16:47 AM »

I like this piece, but I'm having a hard time with some of the rhythms.

The majority of the piece is made up of sixteenth-note triplets in 2/8 time, giving it a 6/8 feel.  This is all well and good.  But at measure 18 it starts to get complicated.  The left hand has a sixteenth-note triplet as usual.  But now, the right hand has a quintuplet figure which is damn hard to play as a quintuplet, especially on top of the left hand's triplet.

I can see what Chopin might have been getting at here; measures 18-20 all contain these quintuplet-over-triplet rhythms, and the sixteenth rest is dropped from the beginning of each of these measures (in the right hand), which overall gives these three measures a sort of "anxious" quality as they build up to the fortissimo climax at measure 21.  It's as if, in breaking from the normal rhythm here, the piece has seen the goal at measure 21 and is "rushing" there.

I have listened to recordings of this piece (Daniel Barenboim is the one that currently comes to mind), and he plays it wonderfully.  However, I can't really tell, no matter how hard I listen, how he's really playing these rhythms here.  It definitely sounds different from the normal rhythms, but I can't really say how, other than it does indeed sound "anxious" as I describe.

So, I don't really know how to treat these measures, and I don't quite understand why this rhythm comes back again sporadically as the piece closes.  After ms. 18-20, this rhythm comes back again at ms. 23, then again at ms. 25-26.  Now, if I try to treat ms. 18-20 "anxiously," how am I to treat ms. 23 and 25-26?  In these measures, the piece is relaxing as it moves towards the close.

How do you guys perform this piece?
Logged

piano sheet music of Prelude
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  



Most popular classical piano composers:
Piano Street Sheet Music Library, complete list:
Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.6 | SMF © 2006-2007, Simple Machines LLC Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!
Page created in 0.129 seconds with 31 queries.
o