ENTRY TEN
SONATAS FOR PIANO AND…
This one will be short and sweet. I’m currently listening to a recording of Rachmaninoff’s (1873-1943) Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 19, and I couldn’t help but scroll through the comments (on YouTube) to see what other listeners had to say about the music and/or the performers’ interpretation of it. Most of them were positive, but I was disappointed by the number of comments whose authors joked about how the piano part seems much more difficult than that of the cello. The main argument they suggest is that “the cellist only has to play one line of notes while the pianist plays gazillions of chords and their fingers will bleed by the end of the piece.” I’m certainly paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it.
The problem with such comparisons is that the parts belong to two different instruments, each of which carries its fair share of difficulties. First of all, we pianists are blessed with an instrument that allows us to recreate the sound of a full orchestra, as I’ve said in quite a few of my previous blog posts at this point. It is actually expected that we will play many more notes in comparison to our musical partners whose instruments have limits. Cellists, for example, are stuck with C2 as the lowest note on their instrument (assuming, of course, they don’t do any extended technique methods like loosening the C-string). They also can’t play nor sustain more than two notes simultaneously because of how the four strings are shaped around the bridge. Wind instrumentalists and vocalists have it even worse — they can only play/sing one note at a time AND they have to practice breath control.
Another thing: We pianists don’t have to worry about playing in tune; heck, we hire tuners to work on our instruments. Cellists and all the others within the strings family are cursed with having to practice their intonation. If their fingers are ever-so-slightly out of position, then those wrong notes will stick out like sore thumbs. Oh, wait. I could also argue that it is a blessing for cellists and their strings siblings to take charge of their own intonation. For example, a great musician can deliberately start a note slightly flat and then subtly slide up for a more emotional effect in his sound. Did I mention that they can also increase their volume while sustaining a note? Wind instrumentalists and vocalists can also do that. When we pianists strike a chord or any note, we have no shot at comfortably sustaining it; the sound inevitably sinks like a stone in water. Again, all of these restrictions are possible in the absence of crazy extended techniques. In other words, all of this stuff is true if we play the instruments conventionally.
I barely scratched the surface of this topic, but my main rebuttal against those YouTube comments on Rachmaninoff’s Op. 19 is this: The cellist’s and pianist’s parts and responsibilities are different and should not be compared. It’s not as if the piece will sound 15% complete if the piano part is removed, as those comments imply. The piece doesn’t sound any less complete in the absence of one part over the other, for they both complement each other perfectly.