Piano Forum

This was the same piano that you played the polish songs on?  It sounds like another instrument.  Wonderful playing.  Great sustaining tension.  I play it a hair faster.  But I got used to your speed.  Have you ever tried that crescendo that some pianist recomended somewhere or maybe i heard it in a master class, I don't remember.  You begin softly the reprise and gradually make a crescendo to the d-flat major part and then a big diminuendo after that to the end.  It's a wonderful effect.  They play this a lot in villages here in Italy, and the effect is really that of a band coming from a distance and passing on. 
I hope this was an excerpt and you played the whole sonata, right?

thanks for the comments.  yes it was the same piano and yes i played the whole sonata, but wasn't happy with everything so i will only post this movement.  I have heard of that effect, and i heard that it originated with anton rubinstein.  i have a very strange edition of the chopin sonatas edited by someone i think caled A. Brugnoli (it's very old and i don't have the title page).  it opens with a treatise on the notation of rhythm then gives the sonatas.

there are a lot of footnotes, like in schnabel editions, where he says this is what this or that pianist did.  he miust have been sucking up to busoni, because everytime busoni's ideas came up, he says something like "This is most recommended."  in one funny passage (the reprise after the middle section in major) in the funeral march, he is suggesting putting the first chord of every other bar an octave lower.  he writes: "Busoni played every second bar the first chord of the left hand an octave lower, imitating very impressively the tolling of the bell.  Paderewski does the same thing, only at every bar.  I do not hesitate to advise the first of these variants."

when i performed the sonata, i actually considered a lot of things that can be done.  i did consider the rubinstein effect, as well as the busoni octaves; i also wrote a simple counter melody for the last time we hear the d-flat major theme.  i decided against all of them, even though i do believe these things can be justified if a piece is heard over and over again and known by every living person in the room, which this was.

in the end the only "unusual" thing i did was repeat the first movement back to the very beginnig, rather than to the doppio movimento.  if you look at the oldest score of the sonata that exists (theres no manuscript), it is clear that there is no beginning repeat sign at the doppio movimento.

another word about my score, there are some strange things that i cannot understand what they mean.  there are these marks everywhere in there: "1C." or "3C."  in the first bar of the doppio movimento, it says "1C."  in the third bar it says "3C."  in the fourth bar (?) it says "1C."  they are scattered around, seemingly randomly... i can't find anywhere in the score where it says what these would mean.  any ideas?

As far as trying out the piano before, I have played on some real beauties in my life and no amount of practising before would have would have helped me to overcome certain "deficiencies".  Nikita Magalof told a funny story once where he came to try out the piano on the day of the concert in some obscure monastary in Portugal somewhere.  He found an upright waiting for him.  He was dumbfounded and made a big scene and said if he came that night and didn't find a grand piano he would refuse to play.  The organizers (the monks of the abbey) were equally dumbfounded and didn't know what to do.  When Magalof arrived that evening he found the same upright with a black cover draped over a huge crate that lengthened the upright and made it appear as a grand piano!!  He was so touched by their naivete that he went ahead with the concert anyway!

that is a hilarious story!  thanks for sharing...