How to play this part? Chopin Ballade

[stillofthenight]

In the first bar...the G4 notehead has a sixteenth flag and an eighth flag. How do you know which to play? Is it just written like such to make the beat unit stand out more and just easier to read?

Then in bar 4... The E4 notehead is connected with an eighth flag and a sixteenth flag and also has a dot!. Do you just play it as a regular sixteenth note? It would seem unreasonable to play as a dotted eighth because the E4 needs to played again to soon. So why is the dot even there?

I would just ignore the dot and the eighth flag and play the whole thing as sixteenths. Is that correct?



Bigger https://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2z6a3ux&s=8#.UyZkAIUVCmo

[j_menz]

It's written that way to emphasise the different voices in play.

In the first case, there's six repeated octave G's as one part, ad a g-c-g-c-g-c figure as another. The g's in the second overlap the bottom g's of the octave.  You hold both the g's of the octave for the whole quaver, and play the intervening semiquaver C's only for their (1/2 of that) value.

In your second example, you repeat the Eb's , but you should also try to give effect to a feel of the first one being held as well.  If you play them as quavers instead of semi quavers (ie, hold them until they need to sound again), you'll  get the effect.