My favourite improvisations

[ronde_des_sylphes]

I wanted to put a collection of them together, not least as something to preserve for the future but also as a way of looking back through the directions I've moved emotionally and harmonically over the last few years.

I don't in any way expect anyone to listen to the full thing, which is about an hour and a half in length, but if anyone has any thoughts, let me know.

Youtube playlist:

Very brief notes:

Halloween - I think this is my finest creation as an improviser, but not one of the easier to listen to. It is completely tonal with the arguable exception of harmonies based around the tritone, but unremittingly dark. It is motivically constructed mainly from a combination of the Dies Irae and a triplet funeral procession theme, and what I like in many ways is that, having written it out by ear, I find it sufficiently cohesive that I have no desire to amend it compositionally. It proceeds from foreboding and lamentation to, ultimately, annihilation.

Two improvisations from a recent recital - the first is from the recital itself, overtly romantic in nature, and I think it went really well considering the evident attached risks. The warmup is more spiky.

Dies Irae - gazing into the bleak, infinite void.

Sonata improvvisata - full improvised sonata, written out some time after the event. A mixture of moods, as ambitious in scale as the Halloween improvisation, but probably more audience-friendly. Four movements: a pastoral idyll, a funeral, a brief quasi reminiscence interlude, followed by a storm and marching to the final denouement.

Winter - it's all about German romanticism here, Caspar Friedrich paintings and Wagner. Rather bleak, as befits something improvised during one of the lockdown periods (which has the unfortunate side effect the piano's tuning was drifting a touch).

Goblins, Procession solonelle and Berceuse: my three favourites from a set of preludes I improvised. Goblins is imo rather Alkanesque!

Religiouso - Grandioso - Lamentando is very middle period 'spiritual' Liszt and probably the first lengthy improvisation which I did where I feel it the result is truly cohesive. Lockdown again affected the tuning, which bugs me a touch because I feel there are some really touching moments in this.

Appassionata - I have a serious soft spot for this one, which was improvised at the end of a recording session and somewhat arose by accident.

Warmup - quite a few years back now but really going through the technical tricks department!

Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but I welcome the opportunity to share a body of work I'm genuinely proud of and I hope someone will derive pleasure from the aspect of music-making that I feel am in fact most temperamentally suited to.

[ted]

Of course I find the last two gloriously transporting, but you know all about that. I call it the Wright effect, or perhaps the Keats effect, you know, “magic casements”, “faery lands forlorn”. I’ll probably have half the forum on my neck in saying this but I don’t perceive the same depth of sentiment when I listen to Liszt or all those other immortals. I don’t like the macabre ones as much because I cannot embrace those revolting mythical stories. When I played pieces like Mazeppa and Wild Chase (yes, I did and not badly over fifty years ago although you wouldn’t think so to hear me now !) I had the same mental obstruction. Did people actually believe that nonsense ? Now I’ve well and truly grasped the nettle as a shallow, hedonistic modernist, which I probably am. I don’t suppose I shall hear it but what I am intensely curious about is how you will improvise into the future, as images, positive or negative, can be as restricting as they are inspiring.

[ranjit]

I don’t like the macabre ones as much because I cannot embrace those revolting mythical stories. When I played pieces like Mazeppa and Wild Chase (yes, I did and not badly over fifty years ago although you wouldn’t think so to hear me now !) I had the same mental obstruction. Did people actually believe that nonsense ?

What do you mean by 'believing' that nonsense?

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Thanks for your comment Ted! Interesting but perhaps not unsurprising that we have different attitudes to the pieces. I think there are nice moments in the last two and they may be quite viscerally exciting, but the first one is the deepest and most formally coherent. Maybe you would like it a touch more without the accompanying imagery (which I attached to the videos post-improvisation, to be clear). But I know that if I'm using tritones it is because I want to allude to the Devil, and if I'm using the Dies Irae, I'm alluding to death! I also know that in the Halloween improvisation a lot of devices I had been playing around with in the immediately preceding improvisations of those months coalesced into an end result which I believe exceeded its predecessors. Personally, and responses to such music should be personal, I think it is a rather unsettling piece also containing deep sadness.

Definitely a lot of stuff in there, techniques in particular, which are descended from Liszt. For me, Liszt's greatest attribute is his manipulation of form, even more so than his ability to use technical devices to enhance the impact of sentiment. I find it easier to manipulate form within a less spontaneous means of creation and in my improvisations such formal development is normally done at the motivic level.

Also, interesting to know you played two of the more "violent" as it were Transcendentals!

[ted]

Also, interesting to know you played two of the more "violent" as it were Transcendentals!

As close as I was to my teacher, and as much as I acknowledge I might not be creating at all without his friendship and musicianship all those years ago, he had an unfortunate preoccupation with loud, showy piano music. Never mind, what's done is done and I suppose it at least prepared my fingers for other musical directions in decades to come.

[ranjit]

I haven't had time to listen to the video, but I recall having listened to around half of the listed improvisations in the past. I agree with you that Halloween has so far been your finest work, and it is my favorite one from your output as well. I find it nice and tonal and yet unrelentingly dark, which is about my favorite kind of piano music.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Thanks, I really like it but there isn't a lot you can take from it in terms of positive mood! Unremitting pessimism, though I find the opening almost elegiac in its contemplation of mortality. The images are very carefully chosen. It took forever to notate, or so it seemed - at least the latter third or thereabouts.