Piano Video Lesson: How to Play Unmeasured Cadenzas

Hi, welcome to VirtualSheetMusic.com and LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin, your host with a great viewer question. "How would you play unmeasured cadenzas?" You've seen them in Chopin and Liszt where the composers will, instead of writing the notes, measure like sixteenths against quarters or something of that nature. They'll just spit out a whole mess of notes with little tiny notes, almost like grace notes. And then you sometimes have these ridiculous combinations like 11 notes against six, something that's totally non-divisible. So you might want to, "How the heck do you possibly play that?" Something that doesn't go at all, there's no math to it.

I mean, if you have 12 against three, boom! You just divide them up into groups of four. But sometimes it's not quite so simple. Yet the beauty of the expressiveness, it sounds almost like improvised playing when it's done right. I'm going to demonstrate with the beginning of the B-Flat Minor Nocturne of Chopin, and right at the very beginning, the second statement of the theme, it has an embellishment as I described with a whole bunch of notes that don't go in, or not divisible with the left hand. You have 11 against six. Here's how it sounds. You'll hear after the first melody, the repeat. It's got the faster notes that I'm describing. [music] Did you hear that? I'm going to play that last group again. [music]

You might wonder how is it possible to play 11 against six? Here's the way to practice it. You try to find the closest measured way you could play it. First, divide it out as close as it mathematically will work. In which case, you could do something like this. [music] So you notice I do two for every note through most of it [music] and then here three against two [music]. Now if I play it up to tempo that way, it would sound like this [music]. It's passable, but it's not really accurate, and it's not as fluid as you might like. So here's the key. Get used to playing it, measured as close as you could possibly figure out a way to measure the cadenza like notes first. Then just kind of loosen it up [music].

It doesn't have to be metronomically perfect. The left hand just needs to maintain its pulse. The right hand has to have a certain freedom and not suddenly have a bunch of notes together, group them tightly. So you can experiment. First, get comfortable measuring, then loosen it up, and you'll find that you can make it expressive which is the most important to think about these cadenzas. It's not about being mathematically perfect. It's about making it work musically. After you [inaudible 00:03:59] measured, you can loosen it up a little bit and find a myriad ways of negotiating these gorgeous cadenzas and Liszt Chopin and these other composers.

I hope this has been helpful for you. If you have a specific repertoire you want suggestions about how to divide them up, send them to me, Robert@LivingPianos.com and I'm happy to respond to you. Thanks for joining me here at VirtualSheetMusic.com. I'm Robert Estrin. I'll see you next time.

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