It's a voicing etude. And an excellent one at that. Chopin has several voicing etudes, and they're gorgeous, but SS's No. 2 is more deliberately didactic, though by no means bereft of beauty.
@@Speleobuff yeah I'm going to use it to practice that technique, I find the pieces that aren't didactic suck me in and then leave me stuck. I need the "boring" one to get it right.
I love how Rene Duchable doesn’t get a NOTE wrong. The Etudes just sound astonishing. Good for listening while suffering from enteritis, it just heals the mind and makes me calm, especially the fugues.
...and sometimes I experience a seemingly undeniable and extraordinarily clear thought that Camille Saint Saens was the most talented human being who ever lived...
1 - Prélude - 0:00 2 - Pour l' indépendance des doigts - 2:10 3 - Prélude et fugue en Fa mineur - 4:38 6:40 4 - Étude de rythme - 8:18 5 - Prélude et fugue en La majeur - 10:42 12:43 6 - En forme de valse - 16:35
In all the years (75) that I have been listening to "classical" piano I have never heard these etudes before and I am absolutely astounded. I thought I knew most is SSs music but I have just discovered these 6. How any pianist could play them like this does not seem humanly possible. I followed the scores and I felt absolutely exhausted and I was only reading!! Some of you seem to know them fairly well, I hope to say that, eventually I will. He used to say that melodies came to him like apples falling from the trees. He certainly had bumper harvests!
Just when I think Ive determined the style of saint saens, I find a whole new feeling in his music. So much content, so much variety under one composer. I found him first in danse macabre, them his carnival of the animals... I recommend saens 3 fugues... the themes are more clearly defined than even bach. Defenitely an underrated composer.
I've never seen and heard anything like #2. That must be very difficult, but very useful. I try to do that with simple chords, voicing from note to note within the chords, as part of my warm-ups for dynamic touch, which are just as important as other kinds of warm-up.
that second piece is genius, melody accent notes within chords, but this is a little more challenging. Instead of accenting the melody high note, your doing all with the chord almost. I've never seen or hard a piece quite like it.
Milan Campestre You yea that's interesting, I be doing exercises for accents in chords. I'm pretty good at it now but a few years ago I wasn't the best at all, nowhere near.
After nearly 30 years of selling classical print music nobody has ever ordered a copy of this!! It's absurdly difficult in places - and so enjoyable to the ears.
Blimey, just looking at the first page of the first etude made my fingers ache. The only one I knew at all was the Valse, which I remember seeing Cecile Ousset play on the tv. She romped through it, making it look and sound like the easiest thing in the world. Both she and M Duchable show us that French piano playing has definitely something going for it, even if it's worlds away from the mighty Russians. As the world continues to shrink and students cross continents during their studies, national schools will continue to die out and we will be left with homogenisaton, where everyone sounds the same. It has already happened, pretty much, with singing. Diversity may be bad for marketing but it certainly makes the world a more interesting place. Thank you so much for sharing.
Numbers 2 and 3 are some of the most impressive etudes I have ever heard. The F Minor fugue is especially awesome, makes me think of a mini experience of what the Hammerklavier offers (not exactly the same, but you know what I mean)! Thank you for posting this :)
Io da semplice appassionata di musica classica, non pianista e neppure musicologa, ho riprodotto e ingrandito in cartaceo la foto di quest'uomo meraviglioso, quella dove sorride sotto i baffi, e l'ho appesa in salotto
This was the incredible technical standard at the Paris Conservatory. Anyone who could make this blizzard of notes sound like music was truly a “finished musician.”
Very worthwhile listening to this set of etudes. Love how this channel provides the scores. I was especially impressed by the fuges. IMO the fuge is the highest form of musical science. To be able to compose a fuge and make it beautiful and enjoyable to listen to is a rare gift achieved by precious few high musical artists. Saint Saens is such an artist.
I seem to remember reading a long time ago (Lives of the Great Pianists or Composers, maybe) that at the age of 14 Saint-Saens would give piano recitals where he would offer to play from memory any of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. Very impressive child prodigy.
Waw, the Waltz étude totally astonished me, never heard such an atypical and brilliant one D: I don't listen pretty much Saint Saëns, but these Études are just amazing
My hands hurt just from looking at No. 3. This is insanity! And it sounds marvellous! I'd say that if you can play these adequately, you don't need to play Études any longer.
@@happypiano4810 Well, these are Etudes only in name. Or which specifcic technique exactly is anyone going to practice specifically by playing the opening movement of the Concert for Solo Piano? ;)
@@Quotenwagnerianer I’ve actually thought about these, and have answers for some. I think no. 8 is about tremolos (Even more broadly, accuracy of the outer fingers). Look at it, they are everywhere.
I don't think I've ever seen alternating 2 against 3 in the left hand alone....wow...0_o!
6 лет назад
I read someplace that S-S played with a dry as toast pre-Lisztian kind of finger technique and that his playing, while faultlessly perfect gave the impression of an exploding mechanical music box. I think that's an hysterical description, as in funny hysterical.
When I first heard the No. 2 etude I thought, is there someone else playing in the background lol then I realized he’s isolating different notes in the same chord 😢 Saint Saens isn’t screwing around
If you know them very well, there are brief subtle allusions to Chopin Etudes in Saint-Saens No. 3 here: at 5:09 (Chopin Op. 10, No. 12) and at 5:24-5:35 (Chopin Op. 25, No. 1). There are other pieces where sneaky S.-S. did such things ...
Thanks for posting. The performer is achieving miracles, and if he doesn't always produce what the composer demands I wonder if that isn't because what the composer demands is not really possible: the pianissimos in the prelude to no. 5 for example, and the exact internal voicing demanded in no. 2. Maybe this performance is as close as anyone can get. I can't find a recording by Marc André Hamelin anywhere: if the composer's demands were realisable surely MAH would have recorded these pieces by now? Of course, he may also think that not all of them are musically interesting enough, particularly nos. 3, 4 and 5.
What a great composer his mastery of compositional techniques is unrivalled. When i look at his score abd compared to schubert forbexamole shubert didn master composition properly. Saint saenes works are so complex and harmonically challenging
Given the more recent "discovery" of non-Liszt/Chopin romantic piano virtuosity, Saint-Saens is definitely due some attention. Personally I find his stuff much nicer to listen to than Alkan, who's all the rage at the moment.
Completely agree. Not only that but Alkan is extremely tiresome to listen to. He doesn't know when to drop something and just keeps repeating the same figurations or patterns over and over. The same rhythms pounding away. His work needs a hell of a lot of cuts and edits but I guess longwindedness was part of his style.
Alkan is always "all the rage at the moment," that is, in the opinion of the few people who are actually interested in his work, usually young pianists who get into him as a kind of a cultish nerdy thing. Most people know that Alkan is second rate. I must say that Saint-Saens doesn't fare much better in these etudes IMO.
Does anyone know the process used by Rene Duchable to record these etudes? I mean, did he walk into the studio and just play them all and walk out with a finished master? Did he spend a week of takes on each one? Or did he play them into a Yamaha Disklavier (or any other reproducing piano) and edit them? The technology has existed to make perfect recordings like this since the early 1990s, if not before. That’s about when the Disklavier emerged. Previous player pianos suffered extreme disadvantages and were not capable of such perfection. I mean no disrespect to Duchable. If he was able to play these easily in the studio, he’s certainly a monster pianist. Some great pianists who could play near-perfect recitals could probably get these on tape (or into a computer file) in a few takes. Horowitz probably could have easily played them, but there would be many errors. He was just so good that you didn’t care about errors, as are many others, but when I hear a literally note-perfect recording of music this difficult without the payout of a Rachmaninoff concerto, I always wonder if it was done at a Disklavier. (Or similar) However it was done, it’s great. But if Duchable recorded these in one take, I take off my hat out of respect for his prowess.
