[VIDEO]Leopold Godowsky Study No.1 on Chopin's Op.10 No.1 in C Major

[pianisthenics]

I first heard this piece back in 2005 or so when the bootleg video of Marc-Andre Hamelin was lurking around (definitely before everything was on youtube).

It's the piece that started my whole Godowsky journey and hope to complete the whole set later on.

Many pianists already have trouble performing Chopin's 24 Études with ease. Godowsky probably didn't think they were difficult enough and used Chopin's Études as a template to write new works. The final result was the 53 Studies, which Harold Schonberg (a well-known critic for The New York Times) described as the 'most impossibly difficult things ever written for the piano…fantastic exercises that push piano technique to heights undreamed of even by Liszt.' It should be emphasized that in writing the Studies, Godowsky was not trying to 'improve' on Chopin's originals. Rather, as he wrote in the Preface to the Studies, the aim was ‘to develop the mechanical, technical and musical possibilities of pianoforte playing