Improvising Mozart with Robert Levin (1 of 2)
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- from the documentary "On the Edge," written and narrated by Derek Bailey in the early 90s. Featuring pianist/fortepianist Robert Levin and conductor Christopher Hogwood, with the Academy of Ancient Music. Includes two improvised cadenzas to Mozart's Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 414.
Man, I wish we could hear all the great composers improvise. Just imagine Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, all of those dudes, just jamming.
i saw this guy live a few weeks ago at the detroit symphony orchestra. he told us that in beethoven's day, there would have been an improvisational piece. so he asked the crowd in the building and on the internet to write down a simple two bar melody in the style of beethoven and randomly picked four of them, two from the crowd and two from the internet crowd, and proceeded to improvise a 7 or 8 minute composition based on them. it was utterly amazing.
Robert Levin is the real deal….so grateful for his many contributions!
VERY interesting
+Patricia Goodson Many people improvise Mozart. Not many can do Haydn, because he is much more original.
@Marianne I firmly disagree with you as does most music historians. Haydn is always rated as one of the great innovators in music, Mozart was not.
@Marianne Mozart was influenced by CPE Bach, the Mannheim School of composition and most of all by JC Bach and the teacher from his youth Padre Martini as well as later on by Haydn. Composers do not live in a bubble.
This does not belittle Mozart, it is just the way things evolve.
@Marianne Your statement is yours and it is shared by few others.
It's a blessing when you are able to play music from the great composers!
Alma Deutscher also took Mozarts invitation to make a cadenza on his piano concert no. 8 KV.246. She made it outstanding.
Alma’s version had genius traits, but Levin’s version does not. Even though Levin’s version sounds more mature, but it does not have any levels of genius traits in fact.
THIS IS AWESOME!
This is some of the material I'm studying for my undergraduate degree :)
Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Gabriela Montero, Fazil Say...the art of improvisation is not dead, nor great composition. It's just that the academic types who are still preaching serialism and atonality haven't yet figured out that music history has passed them by. Mozart's audience understood him for the most part. With few exceptions something went horribly wrong in classical music between 1930 and 1990.
Hey louisvonbeethoven, Can I call you Ludvig for short? You are right not just in improvisation but in great composition. Author Henry Pleasants: " There is more greatness in the music of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, David Brubeck (and related artists) than in all the classical music written since 1920". There is also some very, very fine classical music written today but it gets over shadowed by the attention to the bad stuff! But don't we find this with many modern approaches to products and art? Mediocrity: A sign of our times!
My Music History professor said something to the effect: "We needed the 20th century to break music, to go TOO far, in order to find out what is truly essential to artistic sound." I think that's true. The 20th century served a purpose, which was to see how far you could push music before it could no longer be called music. Cage and Xenakis experimentation with sound allowed music to be unencumbered by expectation, and from their "mess" we now have the likes of Whitacre and Ticheli. Pretty good trade off, wouldn't you say?
I wholeheartedly agree with you. And sinatra3021, what you said probably the most inspirational and truest thing I've heard said about 20th-century music!
thanks for the upload!
Is that the same exact fortepiano he uses in the talk he gave 30 some odd years later?
3:33 *Cue the lovely recorded music
You shouldn't be so closed minded to music there're plenty of people who think that classical music all sound the same. All genres of music have their virtuosi in them you just have to be familiar enough with the music to know what to listen to and where to find it.
I can see his point on improvising, although I do like having a song that's polished. I've got favourite parts of each song that I listen to that I would miss if the performance was different every time.
Mozart is the Gold Standard.
Once you listen to him, the rest is easy.
Nonsense
@@shnimmuc I agree. What the hell is this supposed to mean?
Levin is a great replicate of Mozart’s style & also a great improviser, but is not at a genius level.
ProdigyImprovisation Different people have different genius mind, have you seen him improvise a fugue?
Well one thing for sure that piano is uniquely out of tune So much for authenticity Agonising
What makes you think that?
No international standard concert pitch existed before the early 20th Century. The surviving tuning forks from the 18th century are consistently at different pitches. Also, the keyboard is likely tuned in a historical temperament which divides the comma in more creative and aesthetically pleasing ways than simply narrowing all of the fifths equally. Musicians at the time would have been trained to recognize pure intervals from a monochord (as advised by Leopold Mozart and Quantz) as ratios between 2 pitches, and the idea behind temperaments of the time was to make the harmonic intervals in more commonly used keys more pleasing to ears trained in the manner that theirs were. The consonance are the perfect fifth (3:2), the major third (5:4), the minor third (6:5), and their respective inversions. In equal temperament, standard on modern keyboards, the intervals are actually adjusted from these “pure ratios”. Listen very closely to an equal tempered interval- there is a distinct beating (a kind of wa wa wa effect) that won’t result from a “pure” interval. Since the tambres of harpsichords and fortepianos emphasize the upper partials of the overtone series far more prominently than a modern piano, equal tempered chards would have been far more jarring than we are used to hearing today.
And while I’m on the subject of keyboard tuning, no one took the idea of 12 tones per octave as the basis for music. Indeed, the fingering charts found in treatises of the time differentiate between notes which today would be considered enharmonic, showing that musicians of the time did NOT think of the 2 as the same note. Here is what the singer Pier Francesco Tosi had to say about differentiating sharps from flats in his book Observations on the Florid Song: “If one were continuously to sing only to those above mentioned instruments [referring to the harpsichord and the organ, i.e., the keyboard instruments], this knowledge might be unnecessary; but since the time that composers introduced the custom of crowding the Operas with a vast number of songs accompanied with bow instruments, it becomes so necessary, that if a soprano was to sing d sharp like e flat, a nice ear will find that he is out of tune”. In other words, the notion of having 12 tones per octave is and has always been a forced compromise between intervals on a fixed pitch instruments. The acoustician Jospeh Sauveur wrote in 1707 that equal temperament was used only by the least capable of instrumentalists because it is “simple and easy”. Which is not to say that equal temperament was unheard of as a possible keyboard tuning in those days, just not a widespread one. This attitude towards temperament is the reason why “12 tone theory” could not have existed in the 18th century as it does now. In fact, many surviving keyboards from the baroque have split accidental keys , one for the sharp and one for the flat, so that a system like meantone could be expanded to accommodate more daring harmonies. Playing in just intonation (where all intervals are made pure) is not possible in a fixed pitch instrument because it causes the pitches of the notes to migrate around but that’s a whole other issue altogether.