My teacher told me that the Brahms D minor sonata is extremely difficult musically, given the complex emotions within the piece. In fact, he said much life experience is needed in order to fully capture the musical essence of the piece. To what extent do you all agree?
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Oh, and one more thing. Finding a pianist who can actually play this with you is likely to be a as much a challenge as all the other things.
OTOH does anyone know of a childhood prodigy that can do a convincing Brahms violin sonata?
18 years "ex prodigy". She has also recorded the G Major, also live, but at her "old age".
There's truth to that, but players must some times throw their feet to the fire, and approach the same works later, when they have developed their musicality, life tragedies or otherwise. Else, no one would play the Mendelssohn-among many other "student works"-when young either.
And I agree all pieces ultimately benefit from "musical depth"-even the more technical Concerto works.
Can an 8-year-old super-prodigy play Brahms? I don't know but I suspect there are many people here who would be duped into thinking they were hearing a seasoned adult professional if they were listening blind.
There have been other threads on this in the past as well.
https://www.violinist.com/discussion/thread.cfm?page=2964
In that thread you will see how I have commented further on the issue of "life experience" in musical interpretation.
The more refined and complex the interpretive demands, the more it's important to really have a comprehensive understanding of the composer's style, which involves a broad familiarity with their music, multiple interpretations of it, and if possible, hearing many other performances of the specific piece in question (live, if possible). It also helps to have either an academic familiarity with theory/analysis, or enough exposure to be able to instinctively recognize how the line is shaped harmonically.
For chamber works like sonatas, one needs the experience to be able to understand how to collaborate with a pianist. The pianist isn't accompanying you. The give and take between two musicians who may have independent ideas depends on the ability to spontaneously react (which also involves a deep understanding of the other player's part and the way it interacts with yours), communicate silently, and have a communal sense of timing, and the ability to guess what the other player is trying to do and respond accordingly -- which also requires the ability to react instantly and with a very high degree of technical command. A child is unlikely to really be able to interact fully with an adult collaborator.
Refined technical command of color, shading, and the like tends to come later in a player's development. For kids on fractional-size instruments, the equipment itself might not be capable of giving them what they really hear in their head, and may make it both more challenging to execute and harder to get the feedback they need to learn. Ditto for inexpensive student instruments in general, even at full size. It's far harder, I think, to gain highly refined command of the right hand than it is to be able to cleanly execute things in the left hand.
I wholly agree with Irene on timing as well. I think timing is, in part, a function of the way the passage of time goes by in our heads. As an adult, time seems to pass more quickly, because each second is a tinier fraction of our life as a whole. Moments stretch out more for children, and it probably affects their sense of the appropriate tempos and what constitutes "lingering". That said, lingering is not always better. I always think the young, play-everything-really-fast Nathan Milstein is more compelling than the older Milstein, for instance.
In short, I don't think that it's necessary to have life experience to be a great interpreter of music, and arguably, some of the most compelling musicians are the ones who grew up largely isolated from the world and broad "life" -- for instance, the magnificent Josef Hassid. Some skills, however, take time to learn and are hard to develop as children.
It is a wonderful lesson about the many nuances of dynamics in Brahms, about cadence and harmony, all coming directly from the score. To me it emphazizes what has already been said, that Brahms demands musical maturity, not life experience, but that this maturity not happens to be there one fine day. It has to be developed through playing, listening and teaching - and starting to work on and with these pieces at a young age. Like solo Bach, I think these pieces are life companions that change and develop with us as we grow more mature.
In addition it probably doesn't work without decent piano accompaniment, because of its harmonic content, which would be another challenge for the student to overcome while learning.
To me there is something about Brahms that makes his music music for us older folks. Our music teacher at school said Brahms's music was "about death" which is obviously oversimplified and overgeneralized but it is not wrong (as a teenager I did not like Brahms--except for the B flat string sextet--and I thought it ridiculous that any music could be "about death").
Personally I am sure the violin teacher is right. But if you want to study the sonata I think you should go right ahead and do it (assuming you meet the technical demands sufficiently). I only have a problem if you want to perform it in public. And of course: Who knows but that you may just prove that you "get it" at a young age and that my rule does not apply to you?
Brahms's chamber music is hard. Players may be focusing on just the technical execution even if it seems solid. Or they may be concentrating on the basics of the nontrivial ensemble issues.
Beyond that, chamber music requires extensive rehearsal time to arrive at group interpretations, and can be limited by the least skilled group member.
The cello transcription of the D minor sonata is on deck for sometime this coming year. You can neatly hear the effect of 10 years of experience on this with a 25-year-old Yo-Yo Ma, first from 1981 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UmMz61A4v4 then in 1991 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUbPyq5e7l4.
Some younger players play with rare musical ability, while some experienced folks at times do not have much to say.
Maybe the teacher meant in a "nice" way that Mr. Hoe should get much more musically developed before attempting the work, and went a step extra in describing what he meant, to scare him off the work up until he is "ready ".
While one does not need to "suffer" to play with depth, "suffering" can be fuel for good music making. I would not discount "life experiences" as useless, if the player is able to make use of them as ingredients for works being played.
The really problematical movement to interpret is the Scherzo, both in the Sonata, and in the Symphony. I'm convinced that in those movements Brahms is TRYING to be funny. He's no Saint-Saens, Malcolm Arnold or Fritz Spiegl, of course, but we do need to make it sound as though he is at least trying. Vulgar slides in the requisite places are, I think, the order of the day. I'm not sure if anyone actually does it that way. I certainly never thought of it at the time, and I didn't hear it later in the Szeryng and Lush either - we were very pleased to hear it sounding what I described as "grim".
John could you clarify that please? It sounds interesting but I don't get what you mean.
so this is measure 21 !indicated on my copy as rehearsal letter A). can't you simply play the first beat in 3rd pos, second in 2nd, and third in 1st?
But I would respond that playing Brahms, even before you're ready, counts as life experience of the best kind. There's nothing lost by being exposed to Brahms early.
I fell hard for Brahms when I was 15 or 16 and my appreciation has only deepened over 45 years of playing and listening to others play Brahms. Just wait until you can get 5 or 6 first rate string players in the room to play the quintets and sextets -- almost nothing compares. But you have to have really good musicians to pull it off.
If you're an accomplished player and you know an accomplished pianist, maybe just try to read the 3 Brahms sonatas for fun over the next year without spending too much time learning them. I guarantee it will be a rewarding experience. Sometimes playing great music before we're ready can at least tell us some things about what we need to learn technically and musically.
And for what it's worth, the A Major (#2) is generally considered the most difficult to perform. But to read it for fun is one of those wonderful life-affirming experiences. It's one of the reasons we study violin so hard, to be able to play music as lyrical and superbly crafted as this.
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