Chopin Ballad No. 1 - A Deep Dive Into This Masterpiece

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. Today you're going to get a deep dive into how to play the Chopin, Ballade, and G minor here on LivingPianos.com.

This is a piece that I absolutely love and so many of you have asked for a tutorial on this piece and I thought, yes, let's do it.

I've got a complete performance you can check out in the description. I'm going to use it as a reference and there are many, many brilliant performances of this piece online. I was fortunate enough to hear Vladimir Horowitz perform the Chopin, G minor, Ballade on more than one occasion live.

So this Rubinstein, Cortot, the list goes on and on throughout history.

And today I'm going to go bit by bit into it's going to be a three part series. I'm going to cover the whole first section. Today for you and if you like these videos, share in the comments what pieces you'd like in future videos like this. So let's get right into it. I'm going to start off at the very beginning and then I'm going to talk about how to approach each of these unique sections in this very first part of the Chopin, Ballade in G minor.

I'm going to stop now because there are several distinct sections that we can go over together to see how to approach those successfully.

Now this whole beginning part is basically what? Harmonically, of course the Ballade in G minor is in G minor, we know that. So what the heck is this A flat major chord in the first inversion? Well, if you know anything about music theory, you know that this is called a Neapolitan six. What is a Neapolitan six? It's a major triad built on the flatted second degree of the scale.

So let's go in G minor to the second note, flatted second degree, major triad in the sixth inversion. So it's one big Neapolitan chord. What a brilliant brainstorm. You know when you think about the fact that Chopin was in his young twenties when he composed his piece, he finished it right about on his 25th birthday.

Very important to have a steady beat and interestingly there's more freedom for rubato and we're going to discuss this throughout this piece, the use of rubato and my performance, this particular performance is somewhat spontaneous. I played this piece a million times, I never played the same twice, and this particular performance I used quite a bit of rubato so it's a good lesson in rubato for you as well. So in order to successfully use rubato, which is a give and take in the time, never gaining or losing time, but having a little bit of speeding up and slowing down like in a car cresting over a hill and it gives you that wonderful feeling, the secret to rubato is thinking the long beat. For example, if you were to think of every single eighth note, obviously you couldn't do it. So if you do it half the speed, and that would be most people's inclination, and you can do that, but if you actually slow it down till the half note is ticking, it gives you total freedom and that nice slow pulse.

Can you see how by thinking that long beat, it gives more freedom within the beat to have expressive nuance of tempo, the little bit of rubato, never gaining or losing time, and always to the point where the listener can tap along easily. If you find that if you listen to yourself play and record it and you can't tap where the beat is, then you are being excessive in your rubato.

So you have this beautiful opening ending with...

Make sure you hold this note long enough. One two three four five six one two. Then it goes right into a tempo change, right at the very beginning.

Very important not to do too much with the stretching of the rhythm in this. It really should be absolutely in the pocket so that you don't... Sometimes you hear people play and they're excessive and it loses its charm and its magic. Listen to Rubinstein's performance and you get the idea of the majesty that's possible with Chopin when you are faithful to the rhythmic integrity.

Now originally I was counting in six but once again if you think the two it will serve you well.

Right at the same tempo, isn't that funny? Let the story unfold naturally. You don't have to do too much with this theme to bring out the magic. Just play it with rhythmic integrity with that nice heartbeat pulse that is always with you and the melody just unfolds beautifully. Now what this tutorial is not about is showing the nuts and the bolts of how to learn the piece. I have so many videos where I've discussed how to learn a piece of music which you should reference and just to give a quick shout out to what that's about for those of you who are wondering how do you even learn this thing? Well the way I learned music and the way my father Morton Estrin, such a great pianist and teacher taught countless students including myself, my sister, many famous people how to memorize. You're never going to be able to play this Chopin G minor ballade with comfort and ease if you have to read the music. The jumps you have in the coda for example, you can't be looking down at your hands and up at the music at the same time. It's darn near impossible. It's far easier to play this piece while looking at your hands instead of the score.

So the first thing is read through it to get acquainted and because it's such a long piece and has so many different sections you might not read through the whole thing at once if it's an arduous process. Read through the whole thing just to see for example if this is the right time for you to tackle the G minor ballade, if you haven't done a whole bunch of other Chopin pieces, this is not a good place to start for Chopin because it's a monumental work and it's very virtuoso type of techniques so make sure you're up for it. But then when you start learning it just take very tiny, tiny sections that you can digest easily, right hand alone, all the details, notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing and expression. For those of you who have watched my channel you know this is redundant but for those of you who are new here it's so important to know take a tiny section, I would take the first three measures even though the hands play the same notes you have to learn the fingering of each hand, learn the right hand, get it memorized, learn the left hand, get it memorized, slowly then put the hands together, get that memorized and go to the next section the same way connecting sections as you go. That's the first order of business. You don't want to practice and practice this piece and then later memorize it because you're going to ingrain all kinds of little errors. You must study the score like a hawk because the hardest thing there is to do is to undo what you've learned wrong, not just the notes and the rhythm but even if it's a phrasing or a fingering you get used to the sound, the feel and you're going to waste your time and you'll probably never get it up to a high level because undoing those mistakes is too difficult.

So please if you're going to tackle this piece, if you determine that you're up for it, you've done enough formative literature and a good deal of Chopin in the past, take your time learning it little sections at a time, you'll get to the end result much quicker.

So moving forward, this section then repeats and you have, you know, beautiful writing here.

Make sure you delineate the melody. Did you hear? So throughout the section, how do you practice playing the melody above the accompaniment? You can play everything staccato except for the melody notes.

Now in the half notes in the tenor voice of the left hand, those should be held even in the practice because it's a counter line.

So you could practice it like this.

So you get the clarity in your hands and in your ears.

Now even though that trill just sounds like a whole bunch of random notes, you must figure out exactly how many notes you're playing in the trill. They must be measured.

And it doesn't even have to be that many notes. Do whatever is comfortable for you, but make sure you know exactly how many notes you're playing.

That is far preferable than playing and not ending the trill because you didn't know how many notes you were going to have and leaving up the chance that you end up with the right number of notes. Measure your trills. Now here you have a nice phrase that rises.

And here again, how do you practice bringing out that melody? You see how I'm playing gentle finger staccato? This trains your hand where the melody is so then you can play with different dynamics in the melody and accompaniment, which is what you want. The way to train your hand to do that is by playing different articulations with the melody compared to accompaniment.

And the left hand, change fingers on black keys so you can get smooth legato.

Instead of relying upon the pedal, because if you use the pedal to connect, it gets blurry. Always connect with your hands when you can so you can use the pedal for color instead. Whenever you have octaves, change fingers with fourth finger on black keys. If your hands are big enough, even third finger on some black keys. And you'll get a beautiful smooth legato. Remember, you don't have to connect both notes of the octave. The thumb can't connect really going from note to note. So don't try. Don't mess it up. If you just connect one of the notes, it'll sound fine.

See that? And that goes for octaves throughout this piece and other works as well. So then you have a little extra time there.

So that's what you want to do. You have to practice each one of those. And then what you do is you make the hesitation between each one of those note groups smaller and smaller. So you play up to tempo just each note group.

You see, I'm actually thinking of starting over whatever the left hand note plays. So the hands are together and you practice the relaxation by playing each note group up to tempo. Now, if you can't play those notes up to tempo, play each note group that your hand falls under. So at the beginning, that would be that number.

It's all under one hand position. See that? So there's two ways. Actual note groups that coincide with the left hand and then also practice the finger patterns, the hand positions and finger patterns because that's the way to gain fluency. Now you could practice with a metronome, finding a very slow speed that you can play it successfully.

And do a notch at a time.

That's another approach. If you find one approach doesn't work, shift approaches. So once again, there's three approaches to getting this passage.

One, and I think this is the one that I find most successful that I would try first, is playing notes that are on the beat.

And if that isn't popping and you can't do each of those little note groups up to speed, then just practice the finger, the hand positions and finger patterns.

Get the idea? Because ultimately, what is piano technique but hand positions and finger patterns? Of course there's more to it. There's phrasing, there's wrist and arms and fingers and knowing which ones to use appropriately, which we're going to cover throughout this entire ballade, by the way. So let me know if that makes sense, what I just articulated there. Leave in the comments if this is helpful for you, those three ways of approaching this passage. This is a thorny passage. The first place really in this piece, we have something that you have to be prepared for because it comes out of nowhere, suddenly this fast passage.

Now you have a beautiful section and you have melodies and counter melodies.

So that's really what you want to bring out.

Now it gets louder so make sure you save some energy.

Notice I'm practicing without the pedal. The pedal is literally the last thing you put in when you're working on a piece of music like this. Work without the pedal incessantly until you have honest playing and you learn what you can connect with your hands. You'll also hear where fingering works and more importantly where fingering needs attention where either you can't connect the notes you need to connect or you don't have security.

So practicing without the pedal takes the veil off your playing and allows you to really scrutinize so you can play honestly.

Let's see what we have now. We have all this fun, right? And basically, once again octaves use the fourth finger on the E flat.

And then those same ideas that I brought up in that one passage earlier.

Knowing where the hands play together precisely is one of the secrets to having a clean honest technique. When the hands are not quite together, when you don't know where they land that creates problems. Now, some people will try this. They'll try...

accenting wherever the notes play together. And sometimes that's helpful, but more often it can create tension in your playing.

So instead of accenting the notes at which the hands play together, practice playing up until before the notes play together, ending up in a completely relaxed position with your fingers over the next notes.

Practice getting over hand positions so that you burn in relaxation at all the places before the hands play together. So instead of pushing to play the hands together, you've practiced these little micro rests in your mind. Now, of course, in the practice session, initially, just like I showed you...

At first you're going to take as much time as you need to be totally relaxed, clean playing. So very important that when you end up after each note group, you are over the next keys and completely relaxed. You practice relaxation. This is the key. Because how the heck are you going to get through this whole ballade with all the pyrotechnics if you have tension in your hands? You have to practice relaxation. Now, going along with that is strength.

If you don't have enough strength, you're going to cramp up anyway, no matter how much you try to relax. So there's a combination of developing enough strength so you can tackle this, which is why from time to time playing in the manner I'm just about to show you can be incredibly helpful and that is playing very slowly with a metronome and no pedal, articulating every note like you're practicing a scale or hand exercise.

Going through like that, hammering every note from the fingers, not using the arms, builds strength and it gives you that opportunity to really dig into the keys and feel where they are on the keyboard and build the strength of your hands. So it sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but it's true. You must work on both angles. You have to work on developing strength and security and definition of all the notes and to really feel them. And then you practice relaxation by playing note groups and being over the next note groups in a completely relaxed manner. Work on both fronts, building strength and practicing relaxation and that's the way to have an ironclad performance of the Chopin G minor ballade. But there's more, it goes on and on, doesn't it? I bet you're dying for the coda, which we'll get to not in this one, but there's a three-part series because there's a lot to cover here. So what do we have next? So now how do you practice this? Of course you could practice technique I was just showing.

Slow deliberate playing with a metronome, with a score, but you can also...

You're starting to see a pattern here of the different ways of working, playing with definition and hammering each note. And by the way, pedal, you know that Brahms didn't even have a pedal on his practice piano? Every great pianist I've ever studied with, I've had the privilege of studying with so many great pianists from Ruth Slenczynska to Constance Keene to James Tocco and my father Morton Estrin, I don't want to leave him out.

And they all practiced incessantly without the pedal. Slow practice without the pedal is the way to reinforce your playing.

Don't try to practice too much faster than you can play with security. Now that isn't to say that you shouldn't try your music faster to see what it feels like because sometimes the slow practice doesn't translate to the fast practice. It's a fundamentally different technique and you can practice slowly now until the cows come home and you'll never get the feeling of what the fast is. Sometimes you need to just try it. It will also enlighten you as to where you need work because maybe you can play 90% of it up to tempo and you can zero in on that 10% that needs the work.

So all of this is all the same thing.

Really it's just broken arpeggios and practicing without the pedal to gain security.

And you can do so much with this and a lot of people end...

I've heard so many people ending quietly. There's a little diminuendo at the very end of it. But the important thing is the transition to this absolutely stupendously beautiful theme that recurs again and again and in different ways. Here is the poetic way. Later it comes back in the heroic way with a big A major section in chords. But here...

And once again make sure you maintain that dotted half note pulse. It doesn't have to be every single beat boom boom boom like a machine each quarter note. But those dotted half notes that pulse has to be... And you can get faster and slower with that pulse and bring your audience right along with you. And that pulse must always remain and to get a beautiful sound. Then we have this beautiful section here and how do you approach it? And once again...

You should be able to play legato like that. I know it's tempting to use the pedal. I'm going to use the pedal anyway. Why should I work so hard when you can play it like this and get it to all connect with the pedal? Because you will play it very differently. If you can connect it, you find the fingering and work to connect it, then you're going to have more expressive use of the pedal instead of just using it to connect those notes that you can connect. Because when you then add the pedal...

And that little counter line, you probably have heard it, double-stemmed notes.

And so, you know, some people do this in a very subtle manner. Some people don't do it at all. And you know, some people go really far with it to really hold those notes really out.

It's up to you. That's the beautiful thing about Chopin.

And particularly the G minor ballade, if you listen to a number of performances, as I said, I never play it the same twice, it lends itself to so many different types of expression. And you can decide to be subtle or more flamboyant. You can be reserved or you can be audacious.

There's all different ways you can approach this piece. Not just one way. And you know what? Some people say, oh, it should be done the way the composer intended.

Do you think Chopin played the G minor ballade the same every time? Did you know that when he toured, he had different editions of many of the pieces he played in different places? He actually had different versions of the same pieces.

So indeed, Chopin didn't play his pieces the same every time. So it's not a matter of trying to play it the way the composer intended. It is a palette that you can explore sonically and emotionally.

And let's see, then we go through this part and of course, what comes back? Una corda is nice here, the soft pedal with the ritard.

And the pulse comes right back.

You can keep the una corda this whole section.

And this is the end of this version of this lesson. And it continues on in part two. And let me know how you're enjoying this. Is this helpful for you? And what other pieces you want to have tutorials like this going through bit by bit. Now, this whole first section was more musical instruction and some basic technical ways of approaching piece. To recap the technical ways, of course, read through the piece only two or three times and then get right to work memorizing it first, paying attention to all the details of the score. Then, when you have music, always look for the long beat as your pulse to give you freedom within that long beat instead of subdividing to all the, of course, you have to figure out the rhythm to know where those subdivisions are. But then let the pulse be the longer beat.

You know, Rachmaninoff said the bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician. Well, by playing with longer notes, you have more freedom within the music for a rubato.

When you're working on technical passages, sure, go slowly with raised fingers, no pedal, metronome in the score to solidify everything, hammering each note meticulously.

And then use metronome speeds to gradually get faster and lighter. But also you can work in note groups. Generally, we find where the hands play together and stop just before the hands play together so you practice relaxation.

If you can't get up to tempo doing that, then just do the hand that has the fast notes and just play all the notes within one position and get those nailed down and then being over the next note, the next position, and then practice that note group. And then slowly reduce the time between how much time you need to get from note group to note group. And you could do the same exact thing where the hands play together and you practice the relaxation of just before the hands play together or just before the note groups change. These are fantastic ways to develop the speed and power and relaxation to play the Chopin, Ballade in G minor. I hope you're enjoying this. It's one of my favorite pieces and I'm dying to hear all your comments here. On LivingPiano.com we are your online piano resource. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-play-chopins-ballade-no-1-in-g-minor-a-deep-dive/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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