Getting away with it

[thalberg]

Okay....

I'm starting a competition right now.......what can you get away with while playing for someone?

For example.....I was playing Bartok Sonata for my teacher, and she wasn't familiar with the piece.  I didn't think she was following very well.

So....in this one place where there were 3 repeated sforzando chords, I played 5 instead.  Da! da! da! da! da!

She didn't notice.  I got away with it.  Okay, someone else's turn.....

[jlh]

Is this a competition about what you CAN get away with, or what you HAVE gotten away with?

My story is about playing a hometown senior recital (the same month as my real senior recital).  The only people there were family and some friends.  None of them are serious musicians. 

The last piece I played was Prokofiev's Toccata Op. 11... 

I got tired so I skipped half the piece.

No one noticed...

 

[gerry]

When I'm playing for casual family-types, I often skip repeats in Chopin Waltzes, Schubert, Scarlatti, etc.

[thalberg]

Is this a competition about what you CAN get away with, or what you HAVE gotten away with?

My story is about playing a hometown senior recital (the same month as my real senior recital).  The only people there were family and some friends.  None of them are serious musicians. 

The last piece I played was Prokofiev's Toccata Op. 11... 

I got tired so I skipped half the piece.

No one noticed...

 

LOL Josh!

Yeah, I suppose it's what you have gotten away with.

[invictious]

I was playing a bunch of Scriabin Preludes (op.74, great pieces), and I didn't memorize the pieces fully, so of course I wouldn't have been able to play the thing fully.

I improvised after playing the first 3 bars of each prelude.























I also added some jazz to it...

[daniloperusina]

I had to learn a Grieg violin sonata at very short notice for a recital. There were two critics from the local newspapers attending. There was no time to learn the actual notes, so I just picked out the melodies and rythms, playing simple chords in the left hand. There was an especially tricky descending chromatic passage, where I just played a chromatic scale downwards. I didn't play a single bar as it was written.

The critics raved about how well we did the Grieg, and the 'fire' of our performance!

The violinist was a very good friend of mine, so he didn't mind.

[Kassaa]

I improvised two pages of the Winnsborro Cotton Mill Blues in the finals of a competition, no one noticed :')

[gerry]

I can't tell if Thalberg intended this thread to reflect things we've intentionally done just to see if we could get away with it or incidents resulting from memory loss and/or lack of preparedness. His example seems to support the former--in the case of the latter, I'm not sure we're really "getting away" with anything as in many cases, those who really know what we've done are too discreet and polite to speak up. I once heard Firkusny play the Chopin 24 Preludes during which he had a memory lapse and repeated a small section of one of them twice until he was able to proceed on. I'm sure no one rushed up afterwards and spoke to him about it - did he think he got away with it??

[amelialw]

I played the 3rd movement of the Mozart Sonata K457 once and because I had just learnt the piece I accidently missed out a section...no one noticed.

[lagin]

I played the 1st mvt. of Schubert's Sonata in A Major, D664, and there's a few places where the bars are the same throughout the piece, but lead into different things.  I played one of these bars and came out at the bottom of the page instead of in the middle.  I just skipped those lines.  I figured no one would notice if I didn't go back for them.  I don't think anyone knew the piece well enough to notice. 

Once I was playing the 2nd mvt. of the Pathetique from memory for my Aunt and I forgot what came next so I just played some octave Ebs pretending that they were part of the piece until I could remember what the next bar really was.

[amelialw]

For example.....I was playing Bartok Sonata for my teacher, and she wasn't familiar with the piece.  I didn't think she was following very well.

So....in this one place where there were 3 repeated sforzando chords, I played 5 instead.  Da! da! da! da! da!

She didn't notice.  I got away with it.  Okay, someone else's turn.....

ahh...you got away with that. For my teacher, even relating to those pieces of mine that she never learned herself, she always catches every single little mistake. She'll just listen to the whole piece and then at the end she'll say" you know your mistake,why did'nt you correct that" so now I always do that when I play for her as fustrating as it is sometimes it's really good training for me.

[rc]

I had the opposite, my teacher caught when I masked a memory slip by repeating a bit at the end of the cadence and I didn't know I did it - it was a very smooth panic

Another time at one of my first few lessons I played through a difficult piece excellently, I surprised myself, so I decided that instead of resolving to the tonic at the end of the piece I would jab my fingers onto some random dissonance...  'cause I'm a dick.

I could get away with anything playing for family, they're not listening anyhow

[thalberg]

For example.....I was playing Bartok Sonata for my teacher, and she wasn't familiar with the piece.  I didn't think she was following very well.

So....in this one place where there were 3 repeated sforzando chords, I played 5 instead.  Da! da! da! da! da!

She didn't notice.  I got away with it.  Okay, someone else's turn.....

ahh...you got away with that. For my teacher, even relating to those pieces of mine that she never learned herself, she always catches every single little mistake. She'll just listen to the whole piece and then at the end she'll say" you know your mistake,why did'nt you correct that" so now I always do that when I play for her as fustrating as it is sometimes it's really good training for me.

Yeah, my grad school teacher was not the greatest.

[invictious]

Today during piano lessons, I was playing 6 Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm by Bartok, I didn't practice it that much (was busy learning Pathetique during the week). The piece was full of complex and irregular chords, I didn't exactly learn them, and the melody line was tripped with double sharps, weird rhythms etc.

I faked my way out by bashing random notes, holding the pedal down, and make irregular rhythms.
Then I convinced the teacher to review the Pathetique instead.

Whew. She would have flayed me.

[gymnopedist]

I was playing the third of Ginasteras american preludes for a bunch of non-musicians, and for the heck of it finished the piece, which wavers on the borders of tonality, off with a traditional tonal cadence instead of the two dissonant chords written. My teacher was furious.

[gerry]

La Danza Criolla? Did you end it with a major F chord? ugh - why!! - that's something that would just stick in my head and I'd never be able to get it out.  BTW, my early piano teacher and later my college professor (one in the same) visited and studied with Ginastera during his sabbatical (sometime in the late 50's/early 60's) and returned as a strong proponent of his so I was exposed to much of his work early on. I think these 12 preludes are excellent pieces for young students- they're more like little etudes than preludes..

[lau]

i played chopin 10/4 and just ended right in the middle section.

I played about 4 pages of mazeppa and then made up some improvised ending.

i played about 3 pages of volodos/glinka ruslan and ludmilla and improvised an ending.

these were all successful in the audiences eyes.

[gymnopedist]

La Danza Criolla? Did you end it with a major F chord? ugh - why!! - that's something that would just stick in my head and I'd never be able to get it out.  BTW, my early piano teacher and later my college professor (one in the same) visited and studied with Ginastera during his sabbatical (sometime in the late 50's/early 60's) and returned as a strong proponent of his so I was exposed to much of his work early on. I think these 12 preludes are excellent pieces for young students- they're more like little etudes than preludes..

I love Ginastera as well, and have played several of the preludes, my favorites being the "Accents" and pastorale. It was actually something i'd thought of long before as a joke, and then decided to try it for the fun. Of course, i'd never do it at a real performance, but since this one was only for the parents of my teachers other students, and i'm sure none of them had ever heard of the piece, (let alone Ginastera), i thought i could get away with it.