Practising tips needed for a Beethoven passage please

[bzzzzzt]

Hi, I've been working on Beethoven 2/3 for the past few months. I've really enjoyed learning this piece. It has a lot of fun passages with different technical difficulties so I've learnt a lot. There are many places where I had to go away and do an exercise to master it - like the double thirds at the start, the broken chords in the development of the first movement, the double trills, and so on. But there's one part I just can't get to sound right.

The last movement, bars 30-34, and other sections with the same left hand figure. I think this movement needs to be fairly quick and this is written p with occasional sforzandi. The left hand needs to sounds light and not overpower the right hand melody. But I just can't stop it sounding heavy and loud. I feel that the problem is that the 5th finger descending bass notes make it impossible to create a good wrist rotation for the upper three notes. Pedalling options seem quite complex too. The worst thing is that I have no idea how to practice this. I can't think of an exercise that would help. Do any of you clever people have any suggestions?

Hope that makes sense and thanks in advance.

[ahinton]

Hi, I've been working on Beethoven 2/3 for the past few months. I've really enjoyed learning this piece. It has a lot of fun passages with different technical difficulties so I've learnt a lot. There are many places where I had to go away and do an exercise to master it - like the double thirds at the start, the broken chords in the development of the first movement, the double trills, and so on. But there's one part I just can't get to sound right.

The last movement, bars 30-34, and other sections with the same left hand figure. I think this movement needs to be fairly quick and this is written p with occasional sforzandi. The left hand needs to sounds light and not overpower the right hand melody. But I just can't stop it sounding heavy and loud. I feel that the problem is that the 5th finger descending bass notes make it impossible to create a good wrist rotation for the upper three notes. Pedalling options seem quite complex too. The worst thing is that I have no idea how to practice this. I can't think of an exercise that would help. Do any of you clever people have any suggestions?

Hope that makes sense and thanks in advance.

Have you tried practising those figurations without the bass notes at the beginning of each beat first?

Best,

Alistair

[mike_lang]

I was reading through this the other day for whatever reason, and my wife was in the room - she looked at my LH and goes "you're just wobbling it!" . . . I guess that's how I make that passage go. Group the beats 2-3-4, 5-6-1 (or on a smaller level, group from the second 16th) in your mind and slap the top (thumbside) of your left hand in a sort of rotary movement toward the  top notes. It works well for me, and I suppose part of it is that it takes the weight off of the thirds.

[Bob]

I had a piece with something like that in the left hand.  I'm not at a piano, just eye balling it.

Maybe try taking that pattern over the chord and repeating it on different chords.  If you want to repeat it a lot of ingrain it in the hands, you could only do so much the way it's written.  If you do the same pattern on different chords, you can multiply the number of repetitions you do.  That pattern gets drilled in more, although it lessens the original one a little. 

Is it possible to think of (and play) it as one impulse on the beat?  More as a pulse that emphasizes the more important notes, with less sound/less finger work on the lesser notes?   That would opposed to punching out all the notes like they were equal, or maybe equal with a slight emphasis on the beat.

[bzzzzzt]

Thanks very much everyone - all seem like good suggestions I hadn't tried. I had one more from someone this week to try practising it in dotted rhythms. So I have my task for the week. I'll try all of these methods and let you know how I get on!