PART 2: How to Play Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G Minor — A Deep Dive

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, you're watching part two of the Chopin G minor ballade complete tutorial here on LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. So we ended up with getting into the glorious theme that just when I played in the introduction you probably recognize already where that was going to go.

And so I'm going to just show you and the beautiful theme.

Listen to what Chopin does with this.

So there's a whole lot of stuff going on there. Let's start with this massive chord section. Isn't it amazing how that same theme takes such a completely different character from the poetic to the heroic.

Just in a different key, you go from E flat major to A major, tritone away, so it already sounds different in the different key, but with the voicing and the big chords. So once again, it's a familiar theme. You must practice without the pedal to get these chords. Now the secret to getting this power out of the chords and never getting harsh sound is always play from the surface of the keys. If you were to try to play this section and strike them from above, you get this ugly harsh sound.

But when you play from the surface of the keys, dropping all the way, touching the keys, making sure they're not down at all, and then just release all of the weight of your arms at once.

I hope you could hear the difference. Let me know in the comments here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube.

So let's let you hear it without the pedal and you'll hear the legato that you can achieve using the arm weight as I described from the surface of the keys.

By playing legato that way, you get the beauty of the sound, never harshness. You could hear the difference. Before I was playing it, here's without the pedal.

I can't even stand the sound of that when you caress the keys and dropping the weight of the arm.

And you must strive to get the fingering that enables...

Use fingering that enables you to get as legato as possible and you'll get a gorgeous sound in this section. At first, sacrifice a little bit of power on most of the notes and you can just anchor the octaves and you get the illusion of power without having to use as much strength. Listen, I'm going to play without the pedal first and then you'll hear how this cheat can work for you if you don't have the strength yet to really play everything equally loud.

So I'm playing all the chords quietly, but the octave is big.

And when you put the pedal in, listen how it sounds.

Compared to playing everything loud, which is a little bit nicer, but not as different as you'd think.

And you could come down here.

Then back off.

By the way, don't ignore those beautiful inner voices.

You hear that in the right hand? It's a nice counter melody.

And notice, once again, using fourth finger wherever you can on black keys or even on white keys to get more legato.

These are all techniques to really get a gorgeous sound here. And then of course it culminates on the top.

And this, how do you practice this? Well, you could do this.

Getting and raising and that helps you to get Now, if you have trouble with this section, of course, working slowly, of course, the main stages of practicing are working at a slow tempo, using metronome speeds, working things up and the slow practice delineating everything. But when you've done all of that and you're trying to gain more fluency and speed, sometimes leaving out a note just to get the feeling in your hand and then adding that note. Let me show you. So instead of or you could do The funny thing is, it's a hemiola. It goes off the beat.

That's what's going on, but the rhythmically Now this next section is so much fun. You've all heard it.

How do you practice that? First That's the way to practice it. And we'll also discover the best fingering by practicing it that way.

Anytime you can reduce things to chords, it's a great way to find the best fingering and understand the harmonic underpinnings of your music.

So then once you can do it in thirds that way, then you go Then you can do the opposite.

Those are all different techniques and you could do other techniques.

You could do that.

Et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, all these practice techniques, I can show you 10 more techniques. The trick isn't to try every single practice technique there is known or imagined. It's to find the one that's going to enlighten you into how to play the passage. So it's not a matter of going through all these things. Use what works and ignore what doesn't. If you could just play it with metronome speeds and get it, great. But if you find that that doesn't do it alone and you've done more slow practice and you can't get it, that's when you experiment with some of these rhythms, accents and phrasings. This goes for this passage and really everything in this piece and everything in every difficult piece you study.

It's a whole bag of tricks or more accurately techniques of practicing that you don't have to use all of them. You try to zero in on what is going to show you and teach you how to negotiate various passages. And then of course here's another hemiola.

Now, this is what I'd recommend here is practice just this.

Then, so break it into those two separate chunks and get your hand where it can just do it.

So that's the trick there. And then you can think that you're starting over when you put it together.

See how I'm thinking? I'm showing you my thinking. You can hear my thought process of it. It's starting over.

So even when you play it, without the hesitation there, you can think you're starting over there. And this is what I'm talking about in the last video, the first section of practice relaxation.

So you practice getting practicing little chunks and most importantly when you get done with the chunk being over the next note with total relaxation. Because otherwise if you play this passage as one thing, well I got it, but it was harder because I was pushing through the whole group of notes. Instead you feel like you're starting over and you never get that tense. How many of you, and leave it in the comments here, so when you're playing a passage like this right in the middle, your hand cramps up and you don't feel like you have enough strength and you wonder how other people have enough strength to negotiate a thing like this. Well, there are some pianists who practice eight, ten hours a day who develop enough strength to do almost anything. I think I have massive hands and yeah, strength alone can do it. But I think of like Richter, I listen to the massive strength that that man had in his playing and it's mind boggling. I think he could do just about anything he wanted with his hands. They were just so massively powerful. But for us mere mortals, we have to find other ways. And interestingly, some of the great pianists of the past, Joseph Lhévinne, Josef Hofmann to name two from the golden era of piano, they didn't rely upon sheer strength. It was more that jewel-like control and relaxation that I'm describing. And here's the benefit to that. It not only helps you to play technically better and more effortlessly, but the sound is also gorgeous. Listen to some of the pianists who have that characteristic of that relaxation. Martha Argerich, sure she's got plenty of power, but there's a beauty to the tone because of a relaxed way of approach to the keyboard.

That's what I'm trying to impart upon you.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/part-2-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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