How to Play Clementi’s Sonatina Op. 36 No. 1 in C Major (1st Movement)

Hi and welcome to LivingPianos.com. Today you're going to get a complete tutorial on how to play Clementi's Sonatina Op. 36 No. 1 in C major. It's the first one in the set, one of the most popular piano pieces, and a great piece for students on an intermediate level who want to sink their teeth into something substantial. A three-moment work, beautiful classical style with great architecture, and there's so much to learn from this piece in terms of getting your technique polished and understanding the whole form of the piece. So let's sail right into this. Incidentally, in the description you can check out a performance video of this that you can check out for yourself, a complete performance of the work. So the first movement is in the classic Sonata Allegro form, which is the most pervasive form in Western music. It's not just all the sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Shostakovich, on and on, Brahms. It's also symphonies and chamber music, string quartets, piano trios, on and on and on. This form is so prevalent. So the first thing to do is understand what the form is. I have a video on that also in the description. In a nutshell, it's an ABC form. The A section is the exposition exposing two contrasting themes, one in the tonic key, and here we have the contrasting theme in the dominant, the key five notes above the start. So in this case, since it's a C major, we now modulate to G major.

And you know exactly when the exposition ends because it repeats, after which comes the development, which takes the two contrasting themes and goes to town with them.

As a matter of fact, if you look at the works of Beethoven, he expands the development section to take on epic proportions. But this is a sonatina by Clementi. Even Mozart and Haydn, development sections were not nearly as substantial as they were in the hands of Beethoven, particularly in Beethoven's later works. But here you'll hear the theme comes back, but in different ways.

Sound familiar? This is now the recapitulation where the two things return, but they both stay in the tonic key so that the movement ends in the key it began in C major.

And here's the second theme in C major.

And in this case, the entire development and recapitulation also repeats, which incidentally, in almost all the Mozart sonatas that's the case, Beethoven expanded the form so only the exposition generally repeats in Beethoven sonatas. And in later sonatas of Schumann and Mendelssohn and all different composers. Now let's get to how to play this piece. Now I've got an urtext edition. That means there are no markings in this score other than fingering, except what Clementi wrote. And you'll notice if you look at the score, there are no phrasing markings. There's some dynamics, but there's no slurs and no staccatos. Does that mean everything should be played devoid of any different types of articulations? Absolutely not. The custom back then wasn't to write in every single marking the way it became prevalent in the Romantic era and later in the Impressionist and 20th century music, where composers wrote in sometimes long streams of words, usually in Italian, German composers and French composers chose their language. Sometimes you have to use a dictionary to figure out what they're getting at.

But in the earlier music, a lot was left up to the performer. So that's why you notice the way I articulate things. Because if it was to be played with none of that, what would it sound like if you just played everything the same the way it appears on the score? It doesn't have the same spark. Now in order to have the type of clarity of line, which is what is the trademark of classical composition, you want to articulate staccatos from the wrist to get a nice crispness to your sound, and the clarity of line to make what is melodic smoothly connected to contrast with the sharp staccatos. And that's achieved with the wrist. If you try to use the arms for staccatos, it's too heavy and ponderous because the arms are too light. So what you want to do is this, using the wrist, I'm going to show you the left hand first because the left hand is simpler and you can get an idea of how the wrist works.

So you stay just hovering slightly over the key, not touching it with the wrist slightly bent so that you go right down and right back up.

So you get a nice crispness. It can't be matched to the arm.

The arm is too big and heavy, and the fingers, they can't do it either. And as you heard, it's much clearer, the lines when you articulate to contrast with the nice legatos. Now the right hand also has some staccatos. It's a little trickier because you have slurred notes going to staccato. So it's a down on the first note, up on the staccato, down up on the staccato.

And this is all slurred until the staccato at the end when you come up with the wrist.

You see how that works? So up to tempo it sounds like this.

Now there are dynamics written in. A lot of times you'll find early music doesn't even have dynamics. So much is left up to the composer. Look at the vast majority of Bach's keyboards works didn't have dynamics at all. Maybe that's because the piano wasn't really invented. Although Bach did try a very early incarnation of the piano, he never wrote anything specifically for the piano and other keyboard instruments, particularly the harpsichord, which is so popular, didn't really have dynamics with touch. You can use stops to have different sets of strings. So even dynamics were not really written in very much. Thank goodness Clemente wrote in the dynamics gives you some clue. So you want to exaggerate the phrasing and dynamics when playing slowly because as you increase your tempo, the dynamics and phrasings will become diluted. They lose their impact. And more than that, it helps you to really memorize the phrasing and dynamics by cementing them in by having an exaggeration to them. So what I suggest is get a metronome and use the score and learn all the dynamics and the phrasings right from the beginning instead of trying to change them later because you're always playing a dynamic. You're always playing a phrasing and once you get used to playing it a certain way, you'll be pulling your hair out trying to undo what you've gotten used to doing because your fingers have a memory all the road. You've heard of motor memory or muscle memory. So get it right from the beginning, learning little bit by bit accurately as I described in so many of my videos. Then you get to work practicing solidifying and notice how I exaggerate everything.

That kind of practice, by the way, is so important.

It's so effective for solidifying your performance. It's also a great way if you've had a piece on performance level and it's not quite there, it's kind of gone stale on you. What a great way to reinforce it. Now, you know there's one place in here that could be a little bit tricky when you have the thirds starting at the end of the fifth measure, actually the sixth measure.

Well, that's easy. That's just a G major scale. But these thirds, first of all, using two-four to one-three, but practice it in thirds first, playing two notes groups.

That gets the fingers over the keys. They need to be over and it kind of cements the fingering for you. Then you can do hands together that way.

I like to make a crescendo there. I think it begs for it. I don't think there's any benefit to going...

I don't think it sounds musical. I think it really begs for that crescendo in that measure, leading up to the forte. So notice by practicing in thirds and getting fluency, you will then be much better equipped in order to play it.

Because that might be the trickiest little passage in this movement.

So that kind of covers the first movement. The second section is really pretty much the same thing.

You do have a tremolo in the development section in the fifth measure.

And the secret to tremolos, as I've discussed in other videos, is a rotation of the hand. Instead of trying to do it with the fingers like this, you just rotate the hand and it's so much easier.

You could do that all day long without getting tired, but if you tried to do it with your fingers, that's very tiring. It's cumbersome and it causes tension when you just rotate the hands.

It's really easy.

And once again, you work out this whole section the same way I showed you in the exposition.

Articulating staccatos from the wrist, exaggerating the dynamics, getting great clarity. As you gain speed, lighten up.

Stay closer to the keys and you'll develop tremendous fluency. If you could play slowly and strong, coming from the fingers for the legato playing and the wrist for the staccato, not using the arm for any up-down motion only to guide over the right keys, very important job of the arms, you're going to be able to easily gain speed. If you have trouble gaining speed, get it solid at one tempo and then go one notch at a time.

But don't do the whole movement necessarily one notch at a time. Zero in on the parts you can't play up to tempo. Perhaps you can play most of it up to tempo, but there are just a couple of key passages, a four measure phrase here or there. That's the most effective way to utilize metronome speeds. The key to effective metronome work in this manner is first be sure to get it absolutely rock solid at whatever a slow tempo you can.

Don't settle for second best at this point because if there's any weakness, even if you get it three times over perfectly but you still don't feel comfortable, keep hammering until you absolutely have total security before you move it up one notch. If you put that time into the front end, you're going to have such a great time going further with it and doing one notch at a time will be the easy part.

Stay tuned for part two of this where I'm going to go through what to work on and how to work on the second movement which is an entirely different technique.

Check out this series of videos for you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-play-clementis-sonatina-op-36-no-1-in-c-major-1st-movement/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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