Damn, after seeing you say you learned this in 12 hours, I went back and continued learning the second half of this, and somehow for the first time ever it felt kind of easy to read. I think a few more hours and I'll be done. I probably let frustration and self pity over sight reading and memorization occupy too much headspace when practicing. I think I'm clocking around 120 hours for this (fugue took forever) so still a lot of room for improvement, but thanks for the inspiration!
Great job Eric even with the nice editing of score! I can suggest you short pieces like Improvisation No. 2, Op. 47: XI. The Gnomes and Improvisation No. 2, Op. 47: VII. Tumult of the Crowd. Or Op. 14., 20 and 26.(especially 2nd movement Molto Vivace).
Amazing performance of this monstrous work!! This sonata's fugue is one of my all-time favorite fugues:) Compared to Sonata-Ballade, which one is the more challenging for you?
i mean to remember this particular sonata op.53 no.2 minaccosia was something of the hardest pieces Marc A. Hamelin came across due to the sheer concentration demanded+ techincality....
This is quite an attractive performance! Well done. But “largely improvisatory” “like Sorabji” and “loosely held together” are very odd things to say about Medtner, who was such a devoted practitioner of sonata form. This work is a clear extended sonata form with no mysteries. And understanding the form is essential to understanding the sense. You clearly have an intuitive feeling for the style, but it’s still always worth taking the time to actually break down the structure so you know why each thing is happening. Sorabji may indeed have written some pieces that were, unfortunately, just one thing after another, but that’s really a terrible model for approaching other music! It’s not just a data stream. The form is essential.
Yes, it's clearly an extended sonata form and I do understand the form. That's something I figure out in real time upon sight-reading the piece for the first time. (My sight-reading sounds pretty close expression-wise to this recording.) But, if you go through the score, Medtner does write explicitly, many times, that the passages should sound improvisatory. And, while "sounding improvisatory" differs from actual improvisation, those passages do actually have elements of improvisation e.g. rapid introduction of new single-use ideas, frequent modulation and transformation of harmonies, a "searching" feeling as if unplanned. Like, in the sections before & after the fugue, it's clear that certain motifs are being expanded upon, but only some of the those ideas are loosely texturally and contrapuntally related to each other.
@@Musicforever60 It's important to make a distinction between "unplanned" and "unpredictable." Just because something has surprising twists and turns doesn't mean that it's "improvisatory." In fact in Medtner it's especially crucial to make this distinction, because he writes, on the one hand, traditional free development sections with many transformations but without explicitly improvisatory character (as at 5:28-8:40 here), and on the other hand, "quasi cadenza" passages that do have explicitly improvisatory character on the surface yet are actually quite strict and predictable structurally (as with the entire recapitulation here). These two modes have entirely different dramatic meanings and formal roles, which it's the performer's responsibility to distinguish. And "loosely held together" and "like Sorabji" isn't a good description of either of them. To my eye, the motivic ideas throughout are handled quite tightly. What passages in particular do you see as "only loosely related"? I say all this because your abilities are so great that it seems a shame for you to settle for a first-pass analysis of a piece when a deeper one could result in a truly excellent performance! It's no knock on your fine sight-reading abilities, in which you understandably take pride, to acknowledge that there are some things that simply can't be interpreted correctly on a first read, because you don't know where you're headed until you get there. Overcommitting to a first impression hampers interpretation in the long run.
@@burtcolk I understand what you're talking about, but there were so many times when Eric's interpretations resonated with me much more than of other interpreters that honestly i just let this slide. Can't provide an example from here, but the timing of the chords on the excerpt from Feinberg 4 (that sadistic passage) with that tempo makes the piece feel much more moving in time, idk how to explain it properly, but it's the same thing Feinberg does with syncopations alot. Other's interpretations of this passage sound very different from what i listened to, they express the tonal qualities more than the seemingly unstable rhythm, doing a similar thing emotionally in the end.
I want to like this piece, but I feel it inhabits a very constricted emotional space, and that the piece is essentially just variations on that opening menacing theme, but medtner repeats the motif so many times that one can't help but not be fatigued by it. I feel as though it is not balanced by enough contrast/moments on tenderness.
Yes, a constricted emotional space for sure. Yet, it's actually this property that makes this sonata the easiest to play among the three I recorded the past month!
2:37 is that motif from rach sonata 2?? 15:42 67percent positve its a reference to chopins op22 polonaise (i heard alottt of polonaise references in the quasi cadenza) The whole coda sounds so much like scriabin but without the obtuse rhythms. The "filigree" passages like at 0:30 sound like something rach would write. Yeah so many different composer sounds and stuff i heard, im not obviously 100percent accurate (and ive probably missed out alot) but it shows how studied medtner was.
Actually not. The Rachmaninoff'S prelude g minor, which has this kind of rythm was inspired by Medtner's rythm and structure in opus 17 no 2! So it's inspired by Medtner!
@@collinm.4652 The fugue, the section right after, and the ending are extremely difficult to read and are taking me forever to memorize, I am inclined to call bs on 12.5 hours, but I guess I have heard of people (pros) who can probably pull it off.
