Leaderboard

My goodness, Austenite. How your piano writing has improved since I’ve been gone! You always had great ideas, but were hampered by certain trepidations you had with the piano, and your writing ended up sounding somewhat hollow, as a result. Listening to your revision here, it’s a vast improvement. The nice weaving of the melody in the left hand of ms. 11, then allowing the right hand to take care of it in ms. 17-26 while the left hand focuses on bass, works beautifully. I don’t think you would have written like that years ago. Mss. 28-43 are a very nice development, great swelling of the theme at ms. 39. I will nitpick: ms. 33 is a wasted opportunity, I think. I don’t have access to a piano right now to test, but maybe writing it this way — move the G in the L.H. 1st beat to Eb, then second beat make Bb C and natural E below, and keep last chord the same, and voila, it fits with the following measures in the L.H. Just a suggestion. Mss. 44-63 are lovely, nice scales at 56, and good job reining the piece back at 60. Little note: mss. 51-54, split the pedal at each bass octave, it’ll probably sound muddier than you want to pedal the whole measure where there are two bass octaves. Especially 56 and 57! I know on the playback it sounds fine, but it will become a mess at 57 on a real piano. Pedal each ms. by itself, problem solved. And maybe a dim. from ms. 60-63 will make the then-sudden FF even more engaging. Love 64-71. I think G# should be Ab, but I’m not sure. Great passage. I think on ms. 72, the chord should be sf, followed by dim all through 76, and hold sustain pedal from 74 to 75. Great job with the modulations, very smooth, and really add color to the piece. But the pedaling desperately needs adjusting here. Ms. 112 works fine, but all the bass scales will be a disaster. You know I love me a good, muddy texture, but this piece will not benefit from the resulting swamp that will happen if a pianist holds down the pedal all through those bass scales. This is a really wonderful piece. There’s just some slight rough edges. This is a piece to be proud of. Thanks for sharing! 😄