Jennifer Grucza

Recording yourself is sure a great tool when preparing for a concert. Our pianist taped our coaching yesterday, in which we played the second and third movements of Brahms’ Piano Quartet in C minor for our coach (a pianist and member of the MIT music faculty).

Well, as usual, listening to the recording was very enlightening.

The third movement (Andante) wasn’t bad, really. My C string was unfortunately flat, and there were other small intonation problems (like the difficult double stops in the violin part). But on the whole, the movement was played with very nice phrasing and emotion. Angus’s cello solo at the beginning was great.

The second movement (Scherzo), on the other hand, had problems. For some reason, the first time we played it, it was like we had all had too much caffeine. It wasn’t quite as fast as it felt when we were playing it, but it certainly lacked a lot of shaping, which might have been why it felt so fast - it was just too inflexible. Maybe we shouldn’t have rehearsed with a metronome after all!

Those chorale passages in the strings are really hard to get right. Should they be slower than the overall tempo? More relaxed, at least. And maybe they should be slightly delayed - it sounds too soon if you come in exactly in time. How can we acheive the right effect? It’s kind of an awkward spot with those little sixteenth note figures.

There were also intonation issues in this movement, though the place where you would think we’d have a lot of issues was perfectly fine (the section with the violin and viola playing triplets in octaves). Instead the out-of-tune notes were pretty evenly distributed throughout.

Finally, the second movement just sounded rough overall. Hopefully some of that is attributable to less than professional recording equipment. But I think we also need to work on things like using enough vibrato on high notes so they don’t sound screechy.

It’s funny, I always feel like I’m putting a lot of shaping and vibrato and dynamic variation, but it never comes out as much as I think it is. Now, my viola isn’t the best instrument out there, and I have to do a fair bit of coaxing to get a nice sound out of it, but I bet a fair bit of it is just me. I don’t have the showiest personality (how like a violist, hmm?), and I tend to be the same way in my playing.

Anyway, listening to this recording will help us a lot, I hope. It will be interesting to compare it to our actual concert.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2004 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Classical Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.