Most pianistic and unpianistic composers ever?

[nocturnetr]

Pianistic: Rachmaninoff, by far <3.
Unpianistic: Hildegard von Bingen, again, by far.

[david456103]

lol how is rachmaninoff pianistic....all those HUGE stretches and weird configurations(cough cough rach 2...)
also unpianistic are: ravel, messiaen, liebermann, bach

[prestoconfuocco]

lol how is rachmaninoff pianistic....all those HUGE stretches and weird configurations(cough cough rach 2...)
also unpianistic are: ravel, messiaen, liebermann, bach

Firstly - Rachmaninoff's music might sometimes require bigger hands (He could reach a 12th, I bet he got sick of playing octaves all the time) but his music is not clumsy or uncomfortable, and it takes full advantage of all of the piano's musical abilities (While demonstrating a very deep understanding of the pianist's abilities.)
Secondly - BACH?!?!?!?! Are you trolling me?

[thorn]

That's what I'm saying... what does pianistic actually mean? How is it different from unpianistic?

I think a lot of people will use "unpianistic" to describe music they personally find difficult/music that doesn't fit their own hands/technique.

[awesom_o]

I think a lot of people will use "unpianistic" to describe music they personally find difficult/music that doesn't fit their own hands/technique.

Exactly. So if you you have crappy technique, everything feels unpianistic to you.

If you have amazing technique, everything feels pianistic!

It's a meaningless word.

[dima_76557]

Exactly. So if you you have crappy technique, everything feels unpianistic to you.

If you have amazing technique, everything feels pianistic!

It's a meaningless word.

I suspect that some pianists with a not so crappy technique would disagree. Some composers wrote with an orchestral sound image in mind and simply didn't care how well the music would fit a pianist's hand. I hear lots of complaints about late Beethoven, for example, from people with a very good technique. Other composers opened new pathways of technique that didn't fit into the idiomatic pianism before their time. Brahms would be a good example. And do you remember how many of Chopin's contemporaries complained about his etudes when they were first published?

[lighthand045]

I suspect that some pianists with a not so crappy technique would disagree. Some composers wrote with an orchestral sound image in mind and simply didn't care how well the music would fit a pianist's hand. I hear lots of complaints about late Beethoven, for example, from people with a very good technique. Other composers opened new pathways of technique that didn't fit into the idiomatic pianism before their time. Brahms would be a good example. And do you remember how many of Chopin's contemporaries complained about his etudes when they were first published?

Yeah agree, while many argue that Bach isn´t pianistic, i find him to be natural.
Many composers that had perfect pitch and know what they were writing, often had strange figurations but they contributed to the sound a lot, late Beethoven is a good example as you said and he was at the border of deafness at the time. Some modern composers(like Cage, Ornstein or even Sorabji) have distant techniques but that doesn´t make them (very)unpianistic.
It also depends on the shape and formation of your hands.

[awesom_o]

I suspect that some pianists with a not so crappy technique would disagree. Some composers wrote with an orchestral sound image in mind and simply didn't care how well the music would fit a pianist's hand.

Do you mean they simply didn't care how well a pianist's hands would fit their music?

Everything I write feels good for my hands. Whether or not another person's hands could play it as comfortably is..... not really in my hands

[frenchflip]

For years, I didn't much notice how "unpianistic" Chopin could be, because I was a complete Chopinophile playing little else.  Witness the left hand in the 48/1 doppio movimento.  But when I diversified into Liszt and Rachmaninoff, and even some Beethoven, I found that the sound I expected to come out very naturally fell under my fingers.  Even, for example, in La Campanella--surely not easy, but quite pianistic IMHO.  Some Chopin, on the other hand, requires (for me) a fair bit of time commitment to lay out fingering for perfect legato, e.g., portions of the Bb-minor Sonata and aforementioned 48/1.  But the time requirement is well worth it!

[cometear]

Never met anybody who thinks this, but I guess everybody's entitled to their own opinion.

I agree with him and I have others who would say the same.

[cometear]

Do you mean they simply didn't care how well a pianist's hands would fit their music?

I think most Romantic composers did not bother with the idea of how other people would handle their music. For example, I used to ponder over why Rachmaninoff would write such large stretches if nobody could accurately get it. It took me awhile to realize that he wrote what he wanted to write. It is our job to find a solution to what is written and to express it to others. It's an amazing puzzle. That is my opinion.

[tdawe]

Some of the more difficult Shostakovich fugues from op.87 are extremely hard to execute. In fact, they were so 'unpianistic' Shostakovich and a composer friend (cannot remember off the top of my head) wrote a reduction for four hands, unfortunately never published and thus lost to posterity.

[classicalnhiphop]

I would say pianistic is not awkward for the hand.  Unpianistic will feel like your hand is being contorted.  Pianistic can also be difficult.  Good examples of this are Rach 3 or SOME liszt etudes (not TE 5 for example haha)

[david456103]

id say rachmaninoff is less pianistic than any of the liszt etudes. rachmaninoff is VERY uncomfortable to play, whereas with enough practice difficult liszt etudes become (somewhat) comfortable to play.

[thesixthsensemusic]

Pianistic: Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, Henselt, Schubert
Their style of composition makes excellent use of the typical qualities of the piano as an instrument. People who say Schumann or Chopin are unpianistic composers either are just looking from one particular perspective (like Hamelin or Brendel) or are uncapable of playing their more taxing works. Someone came up with Chopin's op. 9-1 as an example of how unpianistic he is supposed to be. That piece is very comfortable to play and also gets orchestral sounds out of the piano if well played.

Schumann wrote a fair number of extremely difficult works, but when I started learning 'Carnaval' I noticed that seemingly uncomfortable passages are in fact quite ergonomical if you use the correct fingering and practice slowly. OK, there's stuff that seems to be taxing to even the best pianists, like the Toccata, the Symphonic Etudes, or the Paganini Etudes op. 10, but these are meant to strengthen technique, so that still makes sense from a pianistic perspective.

Unpianistic: Bach, Alkan, Berwald

Bach's a very effective keyboard composer but his style of writing is not the most efficient in making use of the sound one can get from a modern piano. Which is not surprising, since he wrote them for the organ or the cembalo. That's not just my opinion, it was a widely held belief that spawned hundreds of arrangements of his works, by the likes of Busoni, Tausig, and countless others.

Alkan was, according to Alkan-scholar Raymond Lewenthal, really a frustrated symphonic composer, who wrote an enormous amount of extremely difficult works that are extremely uncomfortable to play even to seasoned concert pianists. They are so difficult that it takes an enormous amount of time to properly learn them, which has led to people who championed his music, like Busoni, not to learn too many of them because they just didn;t find the time.

In other words, his music probably would have served the classical music scene better, as in, reached out to a bigger audience, had it been orchestral, due to it having been more widely playable with an orchestra instead of just a couple of 100 virtuoso pianists worldwide.

Regarding Berwald, take for example the Fantasy on 2 Swedish Folk Melodies. I find the style very Lisztian (it is also from the same time, 1850s), but the execution is not making as efficient use of the sound one can get from the piano as they could have had. Especially because their left hand arrangement is not as effective as Liszt's would have been, often eschewing large leaps and huge (but comfortably playable) arpeggios, therefore using a narrow pitch range in one measure. That hampers the richness of the tonal palette, something Liszt, Schumann, or Chopin would never have done.

[thesixthsensemusic]

*oops* didn't mean to quote my own text but to edit my post....

[redbaron]

Unpianistic: Bach, Alkan, Berwald

Bach's a very effective keyboard composer but his style of writing is not the most efficient in making use of the sound one can get from a modern piano. Which is not surprising, since he wrote them for the organ or the cembalo. That's not just my opinion, it was a widely held belief that spawned hundreds of arrangements of his works, by the likes of Busoni, Tausig, and countless others.

We're not talking about unpianistic in the sense of how well composers utilize the sonorities of the piano in their writing. We're talking about how comfortably the music lies under the fingers and in this regard I don't see how anyone can find Bach unpianistic. In fact I'd say he's one of the most pianistic.

[starlady]

I nominate Vaughan Williams for least pianistic.  I think he composed less for piano than anyone mentioned so far.  And considering how prolific he was, his 'piano-to-everything-else' ratio is just tiny.  And when I've tried piano transcriptions of his signature pieces they've been....not right.  They're not piano pieces, they're brute force attempts to make the piano sound like the orchestra.   Feh.

--s.   
 

[promusician]

I think any composer has his/her pianistic and unpianistic works (as well as the most), no such thing as pianistic or unpianistic composers because there are no (if have, very few)wrote all works that are unpianistic or pianistic. For Bach, he is somehow pianistic, cembalo-stic and organistic, it depends on works. For Rach IMO, his 2nd and 3rd concertos are rather pianistic compared to the 1st and 4th, which is much modernistic.

[thesixthsensemusic]

We're not talking about unpianistic in the sense of how well composers utilize the sonorities of the piano in their writing. We're talking about how comfortably the music lies under the fingers and in this regard I don't see how anyone can find Bach unpianistic. In fact I'd say he's one of the most pianistic.

Doesn't the term 'pianistic' cover both aspects?

Regarding Bach lying under the fingers comfortably, that's debatable too; his music was written for the cembalo and the organ, both of whom have narrower keys and a significantly lighter action than a piano. This causes lots of passages from Bach's more taxing works to be extremely difficult to execute on a modern piano. The stretches become bigger, the fatigue factor increases, etc. Why do you suppose almost no one recorded the Goldberg Variations, compared to works like Chopin;s Ballades, Liszt's Transcendental Etudes, that are equally, or maybe even less famous, but written for a modern instrument, or something at least much more like a modern instrument?

Because they are virtually unplayable on a piano compared to the latter works. You'll find dozens of teenagers on Youtube who recorded Mazeppa, but recordings of the Goldberg Variations by non-famous professional pianists are much rarer. I heard only ONE recording of the Goldberg Variations on Youtube that was not by a famous recording artist, and it was still done by a professional pianist. And his recording lasted almost 3 times as long as Gould's from 1955.

Same goes to a lesser extent, for many works written for fortepiano by Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart. There's points in various Beethoven sonatas that would be manageable on the light action of a 1810 Konrad Graf or Broadwood grand, but are extremely difficult on a modern instrument. But of course, since they were originally written for, and comfortably playable on, a (non-modern) piano, that does not render them unpianistic.

[j_menz]

I nominate Vaughan Williams for least pianistic.  I think he composed less for piano than anyone mentioned so far.  And considering how prolific he was, his 'piano-to-everything-else' ratio is just tiny.  And when I've tried piano transcriptions of his signature pieces they've been....not right.  They're not piano pieces, they're brute force attempts to make the piano sound like the orchestra.   Feh.

--s.   
 

Why not try some of his original piano works. There are, as you say, not a lot of them, but his Charterhouse Suite is really quite charming.

[starlady]

Why not try some of his original piano works. There are, as you say, not a lot of them, but his Charterhouse Suite is really quite charming.

Until 5 minutes ago I thought the Charterhouse Suite was for strings. 

If our learned j_menz recommends it, I'll give it a try.  Which means finding the piano score.  Watch this space!

--s.

[j_menz]

Which means finding the piano score.  

https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/Charterhouse-Suite-1934/18541582

 

You could also try his Birthday Gifts

The String version of Charterhouse was arranged with RVW's approval, but not actually by him. The original piano one was first called just Suite of Six Short Pieces, but after the string arrangement was given the Charterhouse name, it was also called Charterhouse Suite.