Vallee d'Obermann

[panic]

I can't help but feel embarassed starting this topic above all the great ones below.

I'm currently a senior in high school, and as a graduation piece I'm giving Liszt's Vallee d'Obermann a try. I was wondering if anyone here has played this piece, because there are some things that bug me, not in the technical aspects but in the interpretation. I find myself doing politically incorrect things such as playing bar 186 slowly, very distant and pp-p (supposed to be mf and quick) and, during the great E major right-hand octave scale run a page before the end (bar ~204?), accenting the left hand thumb so as to try and imitate a sort of "at last!" brass fanfare (I have a dream to try and transcribe the piece for piano concerto and tend to think of a lot of passages orchestrally). Part of me thinks that I am ruining, to some extent, what Liszt asked for when I do these things, and that were I ever to perform the piece in front of people that knew their stuff, I would get slammed for it (and would feel terrible about it, because I really respect Liszt). And yet whenever I hear recordings of this piece that, for example, charge straight ahead at 186, I always cringe because I can't help feel that something's being missed. How do you think I should go about it?

[demented cow]

This question is better than some of the others. It's a shame nobody answered it. You seem to be a serious, thinking musician. You have serious musical reasons for wanting to  change the original, so do it, even if the audience knows the music. (It's however probably a bad idea to do this in an exam or competition situation, where the judges may be too narrow-minded to appreciate what you're doing.) I don't think Liszt would be annoyed if a thinking musician wants to try something different with his music. I am sure he did that with other people's music (I read a comment that he played music better when sightreading it because the second time he would add embellishments).

Plenty of great pianists have disobeyed the composer's directions, e.g.:
-Chopin sometimes improvised when playing his own stuff in public.
-Horrowitz in 1965 played the ending of the chopin op. 10/8 as piano instead of forte.
In 1985 he changed the notes in the development of the 1st movement of Mozart K330, where he surely improves the original. And he says he deliberately played wrong notes to get certain effects sometimes (that's clearly disobeying the composer).
-Bolet said he changed the score if he thought the composer would have liked it (you can hear examples in the slow bit in his Liszt Harmonies du Soir).
-Cortot played the bass notes an octave lower in the Chopin funeral march.
-Gould and Arrau both disobeyed Brahms' tempo directions in the d minor concerto (at least that's what I read, I haven't seen the score).

Ok, people sometimes accuse such performers of thinking they are better than the composer. But that's rubbish: they're just saying that they happen to have an idea which is better/just as good at a particular point in some piece.
Moreover, it's impossible for any composer, however great, to think of all the possible ways of playing a piece or all the possible different notes. So if you are thinking of deviating from what Liszt wrote, it's impossible to know if Liszt had thought of your alternative and dismissed it. So you'll never know if Liszt would have disapproved of your alternative, even if you're playing p when he wrote f.

[odsum25]

I agree that it would be dangerous if you were entering a competition with a piece to disobey the written instructions, but I think there is always room for artistic freedom. I just played through Vallee d'Obermann and it seems perfectly feasible to take your time with the phrase and play with the dynamics, although I'm not sure exactly how much change you mean you mean. As far as thinking orchestrally with the second example that is really a wonderful thing which far too few pianists think about.

[iumonito]

Two thumbs up for what you want to do.  If you play it with conviction, there will be emotion, which is the only important thing in performance.

No adhering blindly ot the score is actually much more correct stylistically than pulling a Pollini on this.  Liszt would have thought of you mostly boring and unimaginative if you did not do anything in the vein that you describe.