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A chance to discover the numerous strategies and traditions that pianists apply in order to bring Romantic piano music to life.
Karl Lutchmayer is a specialist in Romantic piano performance and has given masterclasses at conservatoires across the world including the Juilliard and Manhattan schools in New York.
In the Romantic era, the piano moved from corner of the salon to the centre of the concert hall, and, along the way, became a radically different instrument from those known to Mozart and Beethoven. As a result, a new breed of composers and interpreters including Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms had to reconsider previous musical and technical expectations and develop new techniques and aesthetics that were appropriate for the new environment of the piano recital. On this course, we will examine issues such as rubato, pedalling, post-Classical piano technique, the evolving piano, and notational idiosyncrasies in order to build up a picture of the intentions and performing practices of Romantic composers and their interpreters and then discuss and try out 21st-century solutions to any interpretative quandaries.
This course is ideally suited to intermediate and advanced students who are interested in playing Romantic piano music. Ideally, you will bring some music to perform in class which we can then discuss in terms of its key Romantic components, but it certainly isn’t necessary to offer complete and finished works – it’s also very useful to bring works in progress so that we can address the learning process ahead. Additionally, you are welcome to bring questions about scores you haven’t yet started learning so that you can set off on the right foot from the very beginning.
Although it’s very difficult to pin down exact dates for Romanticism (and that’s certainly something we’ll discuss!), for the purposes of this course I suggest participants largely focus on works written between 1830-1890, but earlier works by Mendelssohn and Weber and later works by Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin are also welcome. If in doubt just message me!
