Thanks for this great video. It's very helpful since I am trying to play this piece myself right now. Do you know the video "Seymour Bernstein REACTS to Glenn Gould playing Brahms"? I think it gives fascinating insights on how different great musicians can think of the same music.
man, I'm going through this piece right now .. when I started you hadn't uploaded this piece yet and I was disappointed as you'd helped me through Chopin Nocturne in E-flat major as well as Chopin Prelude no 15 .. looking forward to this!
Interesting that I didn't pick up the middle notes as the melody from bar 6, despite doing exactly that at the start of the piece. For me, it just makes sense that the melody starts in the middle range in the first phrase, then sort of "soar" from bar 6 so that I just gels with the falling triads in bar 8 wherein the melody is just the topmost note
I know, I played the top line as melody there at first too. It's a tough choice between the joy of reaching Ab or more controlled coherence of the melody in the middle (which I do think is theoretically valid because it keeps the same texture, but still not obvious).
Thank you for your great analysis! I noticed that other than the similarity with Chopin as you mentioned, the earlier section also resembles his own early work of the 15th Waltz of Op. 39.