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Guest post by Karine Hetherington

With, ‘Variations’, pianist Joanna Kacperek has chosen to focus on the humble variation. Like many other composers before them and since, Beethoven, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, composed many variations. On this album, Kacperek artfully displays the creative possibilities of these variations, which were a way of exploring a theme for these composers, often not their own, and taking it to the next sublime level.

Variations have also been the means by which one composer honoured another. Thus, we hear Robert Schumann’s little-known variations, based on a theme by Beethoven, in this case, Beethoven’s Symphony no.7 and more precisely the Allegretto movement. To hear Beethoven’s solemn theme being repeatedly played and tweaked and then transformed by Schumann, is a thrill and gives the much-loved Beethoven melody a new mesmeric quality.

Clara Schumann’s variations meanwhile, celebrate the rich relationship (musical and emotional) she enjoyed with her husband, Robert. These intimate variations reveal every facet of their emotional life; joy, pain, yearning, eventually unfolding into a marvellous resolution where gratitude seems the overriding emotion.

Impressed by Kacperek’s debut album, Karine Hetherington from ArtMuseLondon went to interview this breakthrough artist.

Had you always planned to have a musical career and become a professional pianist?

Actually, yes! I started my private piano lessons at the age of 6. From the age of 7 onwards, I was educated in state music schools in Poland that are quite strict and take your musical development very seriously. 

Of course all this wouldn’t’have happened without the support of my parents. 

What led you to the idea of doing an album of musical variations? What does it bring to the listener?

I really love the idea of taking something really simple, like a 16-bar theme, and developing it in any way possible; I find it really exciting from both a pianistic and musical point of view. In a way, it feels like pushing the boundaries – how far can we go? How creative and expressive can we be, starting with such simple musical material? 

The album started with my obsession with Clara Schumann’s Variations Op. 20 which she composed on her husband’s theme – I just knew this piece was special. The other thing that influenced this programming was my discovery of Robert Schumann’s Studies on a Theme by Beethoven – a composition that survived (thanks to Clara) and was not published during Robert’s life. It is such a tremendous set that deserves more spotlight! Then, I started adding other sets of variations that complemented the ones by the Schumanns – hence Beethoven Op. 34 (which links to Schumann-Beethoven Studies), and Brahms Op. 18b (the birthday present from Brahms to Clara Schumann). 

Because all of the works I have mentioned had a personal story behind them, I decided to add Dutilleux’s Choral and Variations from his Sonata Op. 1 – the piece dedicated to, and premiered by his wife, concert pianist Genevieve Joy. Then – Cecile Chaminade’s Thème varié Op. 89  – a little gem, so rarely performed and recorded (my recording is only the 4th in the world!) showcasing yet another brilliant pianist-composer; finally Chopin – which is not only a nod towards my Polish roots, but at the same time it links to Dutilleux and Chaminade through their Paris residency. 

Where are you performing next? What musical projects do you have in the pipeline?

2025 looks exciting. I have performances planned in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Ireland and of course in the UK. January will start with two performances in West London of Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto with an incredible arrangement for a string quintet.

How do you relax?

Playing the piano can be a lonely profession, so to relax, I love being around people.I enjoy the gym and group fitness classes that involve cardio, boxing or dance. Apart from that – quiet evenings with my cat on my lap is also one of my favorite things. 

Joanna Kacperek’s album Variations is available on the Rubicon label and via streaming

joannakacperek.com

This article first appeared on The Cross-Eyed Pianist’s sister site ArtMuseLondon.com

(Artist photo by Paul Marc Mitchell)

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Guest post by Dakota Gale, the latest article in his series aimed at adult amateur pianists

Soon after I started piano lessons in 2021, my teacher showed me a clip from a Beethoven Sonata to demonstrate a technique. “Is this piece hard?” I asked? “It’s a Beethoven sonata!” he replied. 

The meaning was clear: they’re ALL hard.

Since then, I’ve listened to the entire series of 32 sonatas, which are a trip through Beethoven’s entire career. They’re simply fantastic.

In his autobiography, masterful pianist Andras Schiff says that he didn’t feel mature enough to learn them until he was well into his professional career. I’ve heard the sonatas called the Bible of music—The New Testament, as compared to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier as The Old Testament. 

So it was with some trepidation, plenty of respect, and low expectations that I decided to step into the ring with Opus 14, No. 1 in E major, his 9th sonata. Sure, it’s a Grade 6 Henle, which I’ve played many times… but a) I haven’t played much classical era music b) it’s 13 pages of music c) it’s fast d) IT’S A BEETHOVEN SONATA.

In short, my expectation stepping into the ring: fast and furious blows to the body from this serious dude:

A quick doodle of Beethoven that I did.

Also, Opus 14 wasn’t my favorite sonata, but I liked it…and the others were technically out of reach at the moment. (Some, forever.) I prooobably should have started with Scarlatti or Haydyn, but just couldn’t motivate myself to learn a piece I wasn’t excited about.

Anyway, I just spent a month doing a first pass on all three movements and here’s my experience. May it help your attempts to learn this piece or others.

My approach to learning Beethoven’s Opus 14. No 1

Fear not, dear reader! I’m not so over-confident as to tackle a big task like a Beethoven sonata without a clear approach. I tried that with other pieces and wound up playing insecurely or poorly.

This time around, my approach was:

  1. Starting with the first movement, I did a basic analysis of structure and harmony, finding the main and secondary themes, development, and recapitulation.
  2. I identified the fast sections that I suspected would take the most time and discussed with my teacher to confirm. For me, those were bars 4-6 and 39-45, 50-56 and the fast arpeggios starting on bar 65 in the first movement. The second movement isn’t so bad, but the third movement is fast and the opening and fast runs halfway through the piece needed some solid hands separate practice.
  3. Using the techniques on memorization from The Fundamentals of Piano Practice, I memorized the entire sonata. It was the first time I’d taken such a dedicated approach and it worked wonders. I won’t go too deep with detail here, but I can’t recommend it enough! 

In short:

  1. I’d play through one bar of music with one hand, keeping the sections short enough that I could bring it up to speed quickly. Then I’d close my eyes and play through it in my head without touching the keyboard.
  2. Reinforce a time or two, perhaps singing the melody or harmony, then switch to the other hand. Repeat… move on to the next bar. Learn a few lines per day, reinforcing them the next day and moving on to other sections.
  3. Using this technique, I could play through the seven-page first movement hands together in my head the first week and the remaining six pages the second week. It felt like magic! (That book is so good.)
  1. At the same time, I practiced the fast sections I mentioned every day. Once I decided on fingerings, I kept the speed fast from the start. If I couldn’t play it at full speed with one hand, I decreased the length of the section. (ala Kenny Werner’s great book, Effortless Mastery.)

  2. After three weeks, with hands separate I could play the entire sonata (movement 1-3) at tempo, so I started putting hands together. The usual brain breaking occurred and I had to slow down to 50-75% tempo, but I trusted the process.
  3. Another two weeks and movements 1 & 2 were close to tempo, with some notable spots where building speed will take time (those fast LH arpeggios in bars 65-75 with octaves in the RH feel like careening madly along without brakes!). Movement 3 is fast and playing at tempo will take another round of revision.
  4. My progress had slowed, not to mention my drive, another indication it was time to set the piece aside for a few weeks and let it rest. Onward! (For me, that meant polishing Chopin’s Opus 9. No 1 for a masterclass.)

At this point, I felt elated that I could do ANYthing with this sonata that had seemed like hopping in the ring against Mike Tyson. I’d survived!  Was it to performance standards? Absolutely not! Did I expect that? Nooope.

Also, was I sick of the sonata? Ohhh yeah, it was time for a break and some lighter fare. I gobbled up a Yann Tiersen piece from his wonderful album EUSA and waded into Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude so I could entertain annoy my wife with the booming middle section. 

Overall, I’m both pleased and surprised how well the piece went. Even better, I grew to enjoy the piece’s nuances and wound up liking it much more than when I started learning it. I also picked up new skills, including:

  1. Better memorizing techniques.
  2. Smoother fast LH arpeggios and Alberti bass technique.
  3. Better staccato playing.
  4. Better multiple voice playing via the fugue-y section. 
  5. Better grasp of how new themes vary, develop and morph.

I definitely expected a much longer process. Luckily, I’m an amateur pianist and don’t need to nail down a piece to perform at a set time. I play for myself and for friends/family. 

As with any difficult piece, my primary goal for round 1 was simply to get the piece into my fingers and brain. The artistry and expression happen during later revision. In fact, as annoying as it is, I’ve found it’s often at least a year before I feel confident performing a piece live! Perhaps you’ve experienced this as well? 

Regardless, I survived my first round with a full Beethoven sonata and hope to play many more of his pieces in the future. Opus 26 beckons with its siren song of variations!

When he isn’t playing piano, Dakota Gale enjoys learning languages (especially Italian) and drawing. He also writes about reclaiming creativity as an adult and ditching tired personal paradigms in his newsletter, Traipsing About. He can often be spotted camping and exploring mountain bike trails around the Pacific Northwest.

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One does not often have the opportunity to hear all of Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and ‘cello performed live in a single afternoon or evening. Yet it’s a fascinating and absorbing experience because to hear the complete sonatas, one is offered a unique snapshot of Beethoven’s creative and compositional development at three key periods of his life.

The Opus 5 Sonatas are a young man’s works: fresh, vibrant, colourful, and humorous. They are clever and witty – take the false cadences in fast movement of the G minor sonata – but nor do they lack depth, or emotion. They are real “concert pieces”, and also remind us that Beethoven was a fine pianist: the Opus 5 sonatas were composed at a time when Beethoven was carving a career for himself as a virtuoso. The F Major and G Minor sonatas are works for piano with ‘cello, not the other way around, and the piano definitely gets the greater share of the virtuosity: Beethoven was clearly not going to allow himself to be overshadowed by some ‘cellist! Over and over again in these sonatas, the piano seems to lead, and the ‘cello replies.

The A major sonata, the Opus 69, is from the middle, most productive, period of Beethoven’s life. It was at this time that the composer wrote his moving Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he contemplated suicide. His deafness was now acute, if not quite total. The Opus 69 sonata marks a turning point, particularly in the variety and organisation of its thematic material, and its improvisatory nature. It was composed during the same year as the Violin Concerto, the Opus 70 piano trios, and the completion and publication of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. It is an entirely classical sonata in its well-proportioned construction, and, in contrast to the earlier sonatas, where the piano and ‘cello are, more often than not, engaged in witty musical repartee, the first movement of the Opus 69 opens with the ‘cello alone; variations of its expansive main theme and a pair of contrasting secondary motifs allow much contrapuntal and melodic interplay between the two players. This an equal sonata for ‘cello and piano, and the material is distributed between the two instruments with wonderful symmetry. The entire work radiates warmth, positivity, serenity and joy.

The final pair of sonatas, the Opus 102, dating from the beginning of the “late” period of Beethoven’s life, sit alongside the beautiful, pastoral Opus 96 violin sonata and the last three piano sonatas – all truly miraculous works. Like the Opus 96 violin sonata, and the last three piano sonatas, these sonatas seem to inhabit another world entirely, expressing an almost transcendental spirituality. And like Beethoven’s other late works, they are imbued with a sense of “completion”, of acceptance, but most defiantly not resignation!

The last ‘cello sonata, in D major, contains a prayer in its beautiful slow movement, offering an almost Messiaen-like vision of eternity. The final movement is a life-affirming fugue, that most stable and triumphant of musical devices, bringing us most emphatically back to earth.

Cellist Guy Johnston and pianist Melvyn Tan perform Beethoven’s complete Cello Sonatas over the course of two concerts as the finale to this year’s Hertfordshire Festival of Music, on Saturday 11th June in Harpenden.

Full details and tickets here

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Guest post by Jessica Duchen

Beethoven year is over. Well, not quite. In Germany, it’s set to carry on well into 2021, and beyond; one tribute I’m involved with in Berlin is postponed until 2022. Fortunately, to some extent every year is Beethoven year.

When the pandemic struck, I was hard at work on my book Immortal, the story of Beethoven’s (probably) real “Immortal Beloved”. It certainly kept me busy during lockdown, and I often thanked heaven that I had Beethoven, of all composers, for company. If there had to be a major anniversary during this grim year, how lucky it was his. I don’t know any other composer who “gives” quite so much to his listeners and, especially, his players. Sit at your piano and practise Beethoven for an hour: you’ll likely come away with your energy replenished, not drained. There’s a comforting heart in his music large enough for the whole world.

Unlike other composers with anniversaries, Beethoven scarcely needs to be reassessed or re-evaluated. There is simply no getting away from the fact that this is music of genius – adulterated only occasionally, when he had to make ends meet (‘Wellington’s Victory’, anyone?) – and his works continue to influence composers even in the 21st century. Anyone who really thinks it’s a good idea to “cancel” him could light a candle now to the patron saint of lost causes, whose name I forget.

Still, if there’s been a revelation about him in 2020, it’s that his music is sometimes associated with struggle at the expense of his sheer joie de vivre. He was drawn to Schiller’s An die Freude – To Joy – from the start: the poem was published in 1785 and it seems he wanted to set it to music even in the early 1790s. Although he did not manage it until the Ninth Symphony, that doesn’t mean glimmers of its underlying spirit can’t be detected in some of his other works.

Beethoven fills his music with an intergalactic range of emotional experience. In his early works he pushed through the boundaries, sometimes within one piece; try the Piano Sonata Op. 10 No. 3 with its pitch-dark Largo, or the String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1, in which the second movement is said to evoke the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet – and if he had never written anything else, he would still be revered for these today. At the other end of the spectrum, he was writing odes to joy all his life.

The text of An die Freude in the Ninth Symphony is an extract, heavily edited for public palatability. Read the whole poem and it’s startling, even a bit crazy: ebullience, religious ecstasy, passion, drunkenness, siblinghood, social equality and much else parade through its stanzas in a celebratory carnival. Potentially there’s even more of its spirit in the Seventh Symphony than the Ninth.

Yet, to generalise terribly, the sense of “divine play” that creates Beethoven’s celestial joy is perhaps overlooked too often. Our own preoccupations, preconceptions and insecurities mean that sometimes we sideline joy in favour of reverence to a “towering genius”, the perceived need to be “historically correct” or, heaven help us, an inclination to be “iconoclastic” to evoke a “fresh approach”. If we’re to reach the “real” Beethoven, we need to get out of his way.

Take the Diabelli Variations: it’s full of jokes from start to finish, whether the sideswipe at Don Giovanni, the quirky contrast of hammered octaves and two soft little chords – or even the notion of that daft waltz theme as the basis for such a battalion of ideas in the first place. Once I wrote programme notes for a recital including it, with ample reference to these musical jests, only for a friend who was there to call the next morning and report that not one hint of humour surfaced in the whole performance.

Writing Immortal, I wanted to uncover the human being trapped beneath two centuries of accumulated grime. Behind the hot temper, the anguish, the deafness, the chaotic lifestyle, the self-delusions (there were quite a few) and the impossible – if self-inflicted – situation he faced in attempting to adopt his nephew, I found an individual who could be kind, generous, intelligent, inquisitive, thoughtful and idealistic to an extraordinary degree; one who in his youth could be witty and spirited, and whose self-exclusion from society because of his deafness was an agonising burden.

High-minded, indeed; uncompromising, for sure, as the “Immortal Beloved” herself was to discover. And strong, resilient, overpowering, thanks to his sense of vocation. He wrote in the Heiligenstadt Testament that he felt he could not leave the world until he had brought forth all that was within him. His art kept him alive at a time when he might otherwise have ended his own life; thereafter he lived for that alone.

Sometimes we forget that genius is human: it is a phenomenon found only in human beings. What most of us can’t grasp is the degree of devotion it takes to function at such a level. That would need a chapter of its own – perhaps for the next Beethoven anniversary, in 2027.

Immortal by Jessica Duchen is out now, published by Unbound.

Jessica Duchen writes for and about music. Her work encompasses journalism, fiction, biography and opera/choral librettos. She was a music critic for The Independent from 2004 to 2016 and has written for BBC Music Magazine, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer and The JC, among others.

Her latest novel (2020), IMMORTAL, reveals the epic love story behind Beethoven’s famous ‘Immortal Beloved’ letter. Other novels include GHOST VARIATIONS, based on the bizarre discovery and Nazi propaganda conscription of Schumann’s suppressed violin concerto.

Jessica Duchen’s website