@@GilthFrubble Don't use the music you love as your ringtone; it will give you anxiety and make you associate the music with bad cognition. This has ruined my enjoyment of certain pieces before!
+Samuel Runt this recording is from his album "Schubert; The Complete Impromptus; Moments Musicaux (Phillips)". This video lines up perfectly with the audio on that CD.
This statement can basically be applied to every composer. Each one who is famous today is that for a reason and all of them developed sooner or later a music that is unique like their fingerprint. Just to name a few examples: Bach, Haendel, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Prokofjev, Ravel... this could continue endlessly
Niolai, I agree 100%. At 13:28 Schubert moves from a very sedate Eb major to A flat minor (7 flats!). I used to (try to) play this and was so moved at this passage I had to stop. It is so beautiful it hurts. Brendel recorded D.946 3x (possibly more) and each version is slightly different. These 3 works were largely overlooked as they didn't have a fourth one to make a 'set' as opp 90 or 142. But they are great compositions, written a short 6 months before Schubert's death. Thanks Juan for posting them.
Best 29 composers for SOLO piano/keyboard ranked: 1. Ludwig van Beethoven 2. Johann Sebastian Bach 3. Franz Schubert 4. Frederic Chopin 5. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 6. Robert Schumann 7. Arnold Schoenberg 8. Claude Debussy 9. Franz Liszt 10. Dmitri Shostakovich 11. Domenico Scarlatti 12. Sergei Rachmaninoff 13. Felix Mendelssohn 14. Modest Mussorgsky 15. Erik Satie 16. Franz Joseph Haydn 17. Georg Frederic Handel 18. Alexander Scriabin 19. Antonin Dvorak 20. Sergei Prokofiev 21. Maurice Ravel 22. Johannes Brahms 23. Muzio Clementi 25. Francois Couperin 26. William Byrd 27. Bela Bartok 28. Jean-Philippe Rameau 29. Carl Maria von Weber Disagreements? Did I miss anyone?
Derek Suszko Brahms and Chopin deserve better. Chopin should be number 1, he dedicated his life to the piano and created an entirely new way of playing
Personally I consider the Brahms' solo piano works I've heard to be too congested and overall inferior to his lieder. Do you have a Brahms piano work I should look into more? Also while I agree that Chopin is a great genius and revolutionized piano composition he was mostly a composer of brilliant minute pieces and never reached the colossal heights of a unified keyboard epic like the Goldberg Variations, Well-Tempered Clavier, Hammerklavier Sonata, Diabelli Variations or Schubert Sonatas D.958-960.
Nice list! About your Chopin argument I think you should look into the Ballades, Polonaise-Fantasie op. 61 and the second and third piano sonatas. Not reaching the minute count as Hammerklavier or Diabelli but in form these pieces are NOT minute pieces. They are big beasts, condensed perhaps, but within themselves lies a whole universe.
+ Derek Suszko I have to say as a student I totally disagree with this list, primarily because of the lower ratings of Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Haydn, Prokofiev, Ravel, Brahms, Clementi, and Bartok. Rachmaninoff's works go without saying (even if we don't include concerti his preludes are excellent). Haydn is just as important as Mozart, in fact, his piano sonatas are just as good as Mozart's (if not better, at least in my opinion). Prokofiev and Ravel wrote a lot of high quality music for piano, why are they ranked so low? Brahms is one of the best composers for piano and he should be around the top, his solo piano works Op. 76 - 119 are some of the best piano music all around. Clementi, perhaps as a composer was not the most prolific or as musical as a lot of the others on the list, but he contributed a lot to piano technique so he should not be left out. A lot of Bartok is excellent as well (i.e the Suites, the Sonata, a lot of his folk music), he deserves to be ranked much higher. I won't dispute a few of the others, but these are my main problems with the list. But why do you rank Schoenberg, Mussorgsky, Satie, and Dvorak higher than a lot of these other composers? Schoenberg's piano music is not especially good, and he is CERTAINLY no where near as important as Liszt (in terms of piano composition). Satie should not even be on this list, to be honest. His contributions to the piano literature are nowhere near as large as a lot of the composers you have neglected. I also fail to see how Dvorak should be on this list at all, he did not really write any significant piano music. Mussorgsky, on the other hand, I will not dispute too much (though I do not really enjoy his piano music), but the only notable piece of music he wrote for piano is the Pictures at an Exhibition, so he should definitely not be in the same range as Rachmaninoff and should definitely not be considered more important than someone like Brahms. Also, I have never even heard of William Byrd until I saw this list (while I knew all of the other composers mentioned), so I am not sure why he is on the list.
Sorry but I really disagree with almost all your list. I would clearly put Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy at top 3 because each of them opened a new world of possibility for piano (Beethoven: Appassionata, Walstein, Pathétique... Chopin: the four Ballades, the 2nd concerto... Debussy: Images, La Cathédrale Engloutie, Estampes..). Without them a huge part of piano compositions wouldn't exist. Also I would put Bartok way higher than Schoenberg. If we're talking about piano I would put Rachmaninoff higher than Shostakovich, and as much as I love Satie's hypnotic and oniric style, I would put him far after Ravel (just listen to Gaspard de la Nuit, espacially the second piece, and also the andante of his concerto in G). Anyway this just demonstrates that music is a matter of subjective opinions =)
I don't quite get why Brendel thinks that he needs to double the tempo at 10:05. Nothing in the score whatsoever points to a tempo change. It stays the same 6/8th ryhthm.
Who told you a piece should always stay at the same tempo? It would be horrible if everyone played like a metronome. At 10:05 there clearly starts a new section of the piece in a different mood. If you play it too slow you don't get the "agitato". Brendel conveys this shift in mood perfectly as it is very common in Schubert's piano works. Schubert's music doesn't have a strict frame like Beethoven or Mozart and Brendel understands this. That's why he is probably the best Schubert performer to this day. So, your statement is complete bollocks. Even Czerny wrote about Beethoven, that he changed the tempo a lot when performing.
It's absolutely not bollocks. This isnt't a piece from the baroque period or early classical period where tempo changes didn't need to be announced. In Schubert's time you indicate a tempo change by naming it. He does no such thing here, therefore the beat should remain steady.
Brendel's timing is convincing to me; and I have always instinctively taken these passages quicker. Howard Ferguson, the editor for the "Signature" editions of Schubert, discusses time changes in the Sonatas at some length and concludes that there are many internal changes of tempo - some subtle, some very sharp - that must be considered in order to bring out the restless variety of the composer's music. We should also remember that much of Schubert's piano work, including these pieces, were unpublished at the time of his death, existing only in manuscript form. There is no final version approved by Schubert for publication and performance, and so the performer must take a view regarding errors, omissions and interpretation.
