The Art Tatum Variation in Rachmaninoff's Paganini Rhapsody (ft. Jackie Parker)

the orchestra is going to start out and you come in and you want to play that you know with your arms with your back [Music] that's tone-based artist John Kimura Parker performing rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini with the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra at Rice University my alma mater goals [Music] more from Jackie Parker in a moment but first Garrick could you play the original theme this piece is based on [Music] thank you and so on Thanksgiving us Paganini Rhapsody is best known for its romantic 18th variation which captured the imagination of Hollywood and for my generation that meant Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray not bad yes but my father was a piano mover so once Phil Connors Masters the piano he shows off his chops with a jazzified arrangement of the 18th variation transposed up a step [Music] appropriate given the Jazz elements in the piece but the 18th variation is actually not the best example of rachmaninoff's American influences in fact after his friend Vladimir Horowitz pointed out that this variation sounded like the old Rockwell enough Sergey responded only half jokingly that he wrote it for his manager although based on Paganini and the ancient diazire this piece lives in a modern sound World from Hollywood to the hustle and bustle of New York similar to gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue or even more his lesser-known Rhapsody and rivets originally titled Manhattan Rhapsody the Rhapsody in the theme of taganini sounds like it's a piece written in the 30s it's it's bit film Noir in um it's not exactly Jazzy but you could tell he was living in the modern world when he wrote it [Music] although Rachmaninoff composed it in the Swiss Countryside at his summer Villa in 1934. it's evident he's dreaming of New York here this is the gritty ninth variation which as Garrick said you can hear Manhattan of the 1930s in it there is one variation however that reveals some of rachmaninoff's more direct Jazz influences and that is the fleet fingered 15th variation [Music] more on that in a moment but first did I mention it's rachmaninoff's 150th birthday this year and what better way to celebrate than by binge watching in-depth courses on the Paganini Rhapsody with Jackie Parker and the formidable third concerto with Garrick Olson check them out on the tomei's premium platform enter Art Tatum Rachmaninoff was one of many classical musicians of his era who heard Tatum perform including Horowitz and the conductor Leopold Stokowski Rachmaninoff reportedly said about Tatum if this man decided to play classical music we're all in trouble [Music] thank you uh yeah classical pianist can't do that we can however pretend by trying to learn rachmaninoff's 15th variation for help on that back to Jackie okay so now we're at variation 15. this one's famous rightfully so for being very difficult to pull off easy to get tripped up for sure in case you're wondering where the inspiration for this came from certainly one active theory that makes perfect sense to me we know that Rachmaninoff loved Jazz we know that he would go out to Harlem and go to jazz clubs and listen all the time particularly to Art Tatum and Fats Waller and if you think of Art Tatum and you think of the kind of way that he played you know foreign makes sense from that light finger technique to have something like this [Music] this variation is all about fast finger work but it's also about musical phrasing so if you remember and that coming from which comes from this it's all tied together we now have and then and then and then again and it's all related and you can hear it all relates back to that theme the difficulty here is that it's constant running 16 fluids [Music] I remember the very first time that I learned this piece it was it was sometime in the mid 80s I was about to go and perform it with a Winnipeg Symphony my first time ever playing it and I reserved time in the Steinway basement it was the old basement on 57th Street where I could go in there sometimes for a couple hours and there'll be all these pianos around it was fantastic place to be and I went down there with my friend Norman Krieger and I said and Norman was playing through the accompaniment and I was playing the solo part and uh and we got to this variation and and I said so how did that one sound and he said what was too fast I said how could it be too fast it's it's like fast moving 16th notes and he says yeah but you know where's the phrasing you know and and I was so caught up in the idea that it's marked puvivo and it's got a scared sondo marking and I started to think well the whole point of this is that it's really really fast well yes it does go fairly quickly but but you need to hear all that phrasing in there you need to hear and then this has to be parenthetical and this as a kind of a reaction and and that kind of saying your main argument again and this as another reaction and then opening up and reacting and opening up slightly less because it's one note shorter that again and reacting laughs then we have a pattern and we have an actual official hemiola pattern that's very clear two two in the middle of three four that we land on a nice open sea and then it goes sort of crazy with this chromatic pattern and another one which by the way the only way I can play that is to really rotate my wrist just like that just a little bit all the way down it just helps put my fingers in the right place at the right time then we're back [Music] then we have a really interesting variation in the accompaniment figure which is different from all the other ones this goes higher [Music] and then we have not just another hemiola but usually the point at which the conductor starts beating for the orchestra up until this point a conductor is just kind of waiting for you to play all this stuff the orchestra doesn't need to know all the orchestra needs to know is the conductor always starts conducting four before rehearsal 40. I've heard four Before 40 so many times it's kind of burned into my head that that's where it is and it's a hemiola bar foreign [Music] the orchestra comes in and you can no longer be quite as free interpretively as you were earlier you can do a little but you have to be cognizant of the fact that the orchestra is now playing so everything that you've done earlier where you're really having fun things like that and you're just making little colors and and all of that Suddenly at this point at that point you're going to want to be fairly strict with what's happening because the orchestra comes in here and they're coming in with eighth notes and they're coming in very lightly and and all you want to know is that the cello you really want to hear that [Music] by the way a really great thing to do when you're practicing a concerto is to take a section of the of the solo part that you've learned and record it and then play that recording back with uh headphones preferably ones that go over your head actually so that you can remove the earpiece halfway across one ear so you can also hear yourself but you're still hearing that and then play the accompaniment along to the recording you've just made and first of all you'll get to know the accompaniment which is kind of important because sometimes accompaniments have totally different musical figures in them than what we're playing you'll also get a very clear idea of how good your playing is in terms of being easy to follow and that can be useful to know I mean sometimes you'll change what you're doing so that it's easier to follow other times you'll say no I really want to do it that way so I'm going to ask the conductor please give me extra time on the third bead of that bar whatever it is you know so at this point you're just listening to the cello and here and just hearing what's happening I've also noticed that there's a lot of very closed hand kind of technique that you need more in the first couple pages of this variation you know where you're doing this it's in one little area [Music] and most of the time my hand is open to a sixth or a seventh and then when you get into when the orchestra comes in there's passages like this [Music] and suddenly you're having to move around a lot you know and you're covering a several octave span so psychologically it's kind of helpful for me to think a little bit in terms of a little closed and then once the orchestra comes in to just open that up and and have a kind of an organic arm motion to get through a lot of this um there are Great Moments and again always to think of how can I follow the phrasing of this whole thing so it just doesn't sound like a collection of 16th notes and for example and then we have color you can do a little bit of that there's there's a couple of bars there where the orchestra stops playing so you have a tiny bit more freedom to take some time then the orchestras back in and then you're going to have to be a little bit more rhythmic [Music] but as you're playing this just be aware that what they have they have a little echo of what we heard several variations ago when I was talking about Hollywood and the horses while you're doing [Music] so you want to be really aware of all of that so that you're phrasing with them and the whole thing takes on a kind of a musical purpose [Music] there's a question at the very end of this which is how to time this [Music] it should be a crescendo I find it's kind of impossible to play exactly in time you know it's just a kind of a panic so everyone expects there'll be a little extra time on that beach so you have and then so all that's happening in the orchestra there is that the horns are holding a cord they're crescendoing while you're going out and then when you play sondo at the quite an extra note though so generally a conductor will have an idea of what your timing is and they'll cue that but I've always found that if it isn't perfectly together it doesn't matter too much you've got the pedal down and you're just doing a big swoop just take your time [Music] and then finally [Music]

Channel: tonebase Piano

Views: 372,902

Keywords: piano, classical piano, tonebase, tonebase Piano, piano lessons, learn piano, rachmaninoff, art tatum, paganini, rhapsody on a theme of paganini, gershwin, bill murray, groundhog day, norman krieger, garrick ohlsson, ben laude, 1930s, stride piano, 18th variation, 15th variation, larry rachleff, rice university, shepherd school symphony orchestra

Id: KwYGbYF9r6U

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2023