András Schiff about Bartók's style of playing 

He‘s Hungarian…although his surname is actually German

Andras Schiff

I think everything he does is wonderful .His Bartok, Beethoven and Schubert . His Bach I have trouble with -too watery . I need a dryer piano sound . I think the music is from a harsh time that saw beauty in a more honest way not as a pretty thing but the Natural ! Americans don't get this about European art and that's why contemporary aesthetics are not s popular here as in Europe . Americans believe in comfort and entertainment : dross !

Style brisé

Very interesting here what you say about Debussy's piano roll . I hope it wasn't doctored . I must try to find some recordings of Debussy . I've heard Ravel's not so fantastic recordings that some say were made by Casadesus or Perlemuter . I know Bartok in Scarlatti . I must find out what his Chopin and Beethoven sound like . I want to disagree with your stance that Bartok was a Depachmann sort . He was born late enough like Hofmann and Lhevinne to not break chords even in music where it should be correct . I'm no academic but this issue is worth investigating .

@@MrInterestingthings Bartok did break chords quite frequently. Have a listen to his "Kreutzer Sonata" with Szigeti!

@@ProfDrislane Ijust heard he and Szigeti as well as he and his wife Ditta in Brahms Quintet rescored . The recordings are old and much is difficult to hear but it does not seem that one hand plays before another . But thankyou for this . I've known about the Szigeti recordinds since I was a child they came out on Columbia if im not mistaken just like the Benny Goodman . Only recently made aware of the Scarlatti and recordings with his wife . Hope I can find much that his exacting mind left us . I see op.14 is here I'll listen toit again . I really think his generation didn't arpeggiate or play one hand before the other .Pianists born after 1860 one does not find this Paderewski and DePachmann were over a generation earlier than Lhevinne,Godowsky ,Moisewitsch .I'm going to hear again the Leschetitzky students .

@@MrInterestingthings Regarding the use of "a-synchronization" or the playing of chords, etc., with the hands not together, it's important to notice that it's a matter of degree. Bartok, Godowsky, Horowitz, Moiseiwitsch all use the technique in subtle ways. Of later pianists, Glenn Gould used it frequently; not only in Bach, but also Brahms, and Schoenberg. What's interesting about the pianists listed is that they played "contrapuntally," bringing put inner voices, etc. Perhaps it's not surprising that arpeggiation is used. Historically we can trace these tendencies all the way back to the organ and the harpsichord. On the organ, chords are struck together, on the harpsichord, broken. Composers who were trained on the organ as well as the piano most likely played with little arpeggiation. Surely Beethoven and Mendelssohn fall into this category. Chopin and Schumann would be a different case. With Liszt, his stated goal was to turn the piano into and orchestra, so he certainly availed himself of the chance to create widely spaced chords requiring arpeggiation. A wide survey of recordings by pupils of Liszt and his contemporaries reveals that their approach to rubato, articulation, arpeggiation and "rhetoric" is rather different from later approaches. So sometimes I feel that we want things to sound "modern" for psychological reasons..

wow, with the songs that are on youtube too?

@@JannisSicker many of them I think...lots of Bulgarian rhythm

One has to have had the beat training and been very adept to get inside those halls . Many do study with him but they're above normal types of intelligences . Each generation the new standard is so high it makes old recordings seem deranged to me ears . I used to listen to Hofmann like he was a gawd - no more .

Start with the 3rd Piano Concerto and work back. It took MANY listens to wrap my head around his music.

@@paulschumann4137 Thankyou. I will try what you suggest !

@@paulschumann4137 That's exactly what I'd recommend. Finish with the string quartets.....actually, start with the 3rd Concerto and the Romanian Dances. You get beautiful melodies with that haunted folk music. Try the 4th String Quartet. It's rhythmically wild. Crazy. If that finally grabs you, I think you "get" him. I know nothing about music. Can't play. But Bartok is just a turn on. He takes you to different worlds.

Disagree totally ! Marvelous Mandarin . The Romanian and folk music for Piano . Bartok has enriched my composing . Hindemith's Concerto for Orchestra gives me life . Bartok's same has awoken thousands of composers to how to compose !

From counting ?

Not an expert but I’d assume so. I think one of the most pure forms of instrumentation Is your voice. Back then there was tons of singing in churches and stuff, Bach was known for his chorales and beethoven learned music from them etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if singing wasn’t huge for them. For Rachmaninoff it was for sure, both him and Horowitz as well idolized a singer named Feodor Chaliapin.

There’s so many vernacular influences to all classical composers that are lost to us because we’re removed from the times and places where they lived, so to us their music just sound “classical”. But if one studies the vernacular musics of where all these composers lived, one can begin to hear hints of them now and again, even in Beethoven.

Beethoven did use folk song motifs. He probably knew just about all there was to know about what was out there. Writing for the voice was what he struggled with most. He agonized over his opera, and his masses don't really sound masslike--more symphonic, just like the singing in the 9th. Even the best aren't the best at everything

Found it myself! Fehér László lovat lopott A fekete halom alatt: Fehér Lászlót ott megfogták Tömlöc fenekire zárták

@@morrigan236 Here is my translation: Laszlo Feher stole a horse underneath the black hill Laszlo Feher was captured there and locked into the bottom of a dungeon

@@wcucomneuroscience258 Thanks!

Hi Hazem. The piece is No. 25 from Béla Bartók's 'For Children'. You can find more details here: explorethescore.org/pgs/bartok/die_musik_entdecken/fur_kinder_nr_25.html (An English version of the Bartôk site is coming in the next days...)

@@ExploreTheScore Thank you very much

I took a full course devoted to Bartok’s music in my graduate studies with scholar Halsey Stevens in the early 1970s, and while Barton’s music has a wonderful, unique energy and flavour to it, I never once thought of it as being played by a ‘lion’, nor that it needed to be. Schiff gives a lovely perspective here.

@@denise2169 Halsey Stevens composed good piano music! hi Denise, i was just mildly trolling haha. I can't imagine Schiff persuasively in the virtuosic Bartok pieces like op.1 (or was it op.2) or the Etudes. David Dubal writes that Schiff is like a Marshmallow 🍧🎹

I believe Sir András meant chaos.

Really? And what makes you such a specialist in regards to US politics, CVA?

The point Schiff was making, went over your head. Also, “aka superior musicians”, what a silly inherently subjective generalization.

@@donprudenzio he was just trying to bait you

@@specialperson335 Perhaps. That's one of the issues with written text, isn't it? Irony, sarcasm et cetera is much more easy to "read" between the lines when taken into account someone's intonation or other aspects of context. Whatever though.

Jazz musicians can’t even read music. Would you respect an actor who couldn’t read words? I have never seen a point to jazz. It rambles on, has no climaxes, lacks clear cut structure and is predictably lacking in dynamic shadings and nuances. Rhythmically it is very limited and tends to sound annoyingly repetitive and lacking in variety of beats and meters. As a classical performer, jazz bores me to tears. I can’t stand it for more then two minutes. My mind wanders and it just seems like endless notes without any logic or structure, let alone any emotional message. Believe me, I have tried to listen and I just can’t. It is like comparing a stand up improvisational comic rather than a trained actor. To my mind, what makes classical music head and shoulders superior to jazz is that we all play the same notes and find something different. To each his own. Incidentally, I have a masters’ from Juilliard in piano. I’m no slouch musician. I worked hard to be able to play 70 concertos from memory. When I was at Juilliard, anyone playing jazz would be thrown out of a practice room, as the guards would think they weren’t a serious student. They have sadly lowered the school’s respectability by including a jazz program. This is sad. To top it off, they gave Paul McCartney an honorary degree. This hack couldn’t read a note of music. It’s an insult to the hard work we put in to ‘earn’ our degrees. I hope they don’t continue down this path of cheapening the school’s reputation. It’s not an encouraging sign.

PS I noticed you are Norwegian with a clearly Finnish name. I find it interesting that Europeans like jazz so much. We trained classical American musicians really look down on jazz because we know it came from people who were not trained musicians, most of whom could not read music. There is an inherent prejudice against jazz in the US and you will not find many people who like it. It has a very small following in the USA. Just an observation. We consider it a sort of “low class” or “ghetto” music. It may also have a racial bias element. But that aside, I can’t sit through it. I just can’t stand it. So pointless. Incidentally, Wynton Marsalis was my contemporary at Juilliard. It seems that he was one of the people who pushed the school down the road to accepting jazz as a serious area of study. He has now taught jazz at the school. I may have been there just as they started opening up to taking jazz seriously.