Revolutionaries Of Classical Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with revolutionaries of classical piano. I want to go through and just show a few. Now this could be a 10 week course or a whole semester or two, there's so many. But I'm just going to outline a few of the real groundbreaking composers of classical piano that really opened up vast vistas of compositional possibilities in the instrument. You know if you go back to Bach, of course the piano wasn't even invented yet and the music was very contrapuntal and stayed kind of pretty close together, not a lot of leaps and things. And even in Mozart, where it was written for the piano, the early piano, you have pieces like the famous K545 C major sonata, but I'm going to play a little bit of the second movement and watch how everything kind of stays close together.

So you see that it's very tightly knit and most Mozart music, and Haydn for that matter, stay pretty, you know, not a lot of leaps and things. Now of course where is the natural place for me to go next with the explosion of different techniques on the piano? Obviously Beethoven comes to mind and man there's so many different things I can show you with Beethoven. I have other videos on how Beethoven exploited the piano and compositional techniques, but I'm going to show you just a little bit of one technique that you would never find in Mozart like this. And that is in the first movement of the Pathetique Sonata, he has this crossed hands thing that's really pretty interesting.

And you can see that that's something you would not ever see in Mozart. There's a little bit of crossed hands like in the Alla Turca Sonata, you know.

There's a little bit of that, but not to this extent of what Beethoven brought to the table, not to mention the dynamicism of his expression with the Subito pianos, the sudden fortes, there's so much that changed piano playing tremendously.

Now where do we go from here? Well think about of course Chopin. Chopin is to the piano and the piano is to Chopin. It's almost impossible to separate the piano and Chopin. So many different textures and techniques. Where do we begin? I'm going to play something you've probably heard me play before. It's just a brief excerpt of the G minor blood and the genius of knowing what something like this would sound like fast. And first I'm going to play it slowly and you'll see that it doesn't seem to make, without the pedal and slowly, what is it sounding? And it's kind of like when you look at a painting from across the room and it looks beautiful and you get up close and you just see these blobs of paint because could you imagine that Chopin had to write each one of those separate notes on a staff paper and he imagined it sounding like this.

And such a gorgeous theme and yet the colors, the expression, the vibrancy of the writing and that he could conceive of this, it really revolutionized piano playing and piano composition for all the composers who followed. Of course we shouldn't leave out Liszt and Mendelssohn and Schumann. I'm just giving you a taste of some of the luminaries in the revolutions they created in piano music. And where does it go from here? Well in the 20th century all bets are off with Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev. Listen for example a little bit of Debussy and this is from his Children's Corner Suite and this is the Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum, not the beginning section and listen what he's able to achieve with the different colors that he creates on the piano.

So you can see the progression of different types of textures and writing and techniques that the great composers expanded what the piano was capable of and we owe it to all these great composers that we have this wealth of great music that exploits the piano for all its worth and the progression through history is so interesting to behold.

Leave in the comments here other composers you feel were instrumental in expanding the scope of the piano because there are so many. I could make part 2, part 3, part 4 of this video and still not touch on all the great composers. Again, I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. If you haven't subscribed, this is a perfect time to go ahead and thumbs up, ring the bell and spread this channel to other people who love the piano like we do. See you next time, bye bye.

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