Piano Forum

One of my friends has played it and said that the sonata was not as hard as it was made out to be. She said that it was easier than some of the earlier ones. I wonder if that's true.

This from Tovey:

"Of the five last sonatas op.110 is technically the easiest, and except in the stretto of the Fugue it does not puzzle the listener.  Hence the younger player will find it even more discouraging than op.109.  The grotesque trio of the Scherzo is the only passage that promises to capitulate to technical practice; and elsewhere the player has not even the safeguard that where he does not play convincingly the music will at least sound mysterious."

op.110's music can be hard to make sense of, and some parts seem nearly impossible to convey what Beethoven wanted to with the phrasing et cetera.  Sometimes it is also a bit strangely written for piano, with chords coming at odd times, and it is difficult to baalance out the sonority with the phrasing.

Ravel's Jeux d'eau is very hard, but I find it difficult for probably very different reasons than most people (it is becoming apparent to me!)  Ravel once said of Alborado from Miroirs that he wrote it "as tightly structured as a Bach fugue."  That is a very revealing comment about his music in general, which especially in his piano writing bears a closer resemblance to that of Scriabin  than Debussy's music.
Jeux d'eau has a number of layers of polyphony, almost like a Fugue, and it is very difficult to discover these, and to balance the parts, and to provide a continuous, organic interpretation - which is only possible through a study of the inner life of the pitches and harmonies.  This piece is very hard to tell a seamless story with, but it doesn't need to be that hard, if people would stop looking at it as a series of arpeggios and invest some time into really learning the relationships between the notes.

That being said, it is an ideal piece for learning the technique of jeu perle' (imagine an accent .

Walter Ramsey