April 29: Fantasy in D minor

Today, I played through Mozart's "Fantasy in D minor". I don't always try to play classical music exactly as written, and you'll notice some ad-libbing here. Most of the time, I make something up in response to a mistake - that's the secret to my extemporaneous music, too. If I don't play the note I expected to, and if it's at all possible to change that mistake into the first note of a new direction, I go for it. In this recording, there are several such mistakes, listed below the player.

Recording #5: 04/29/10 12:59 PM
Location: NRHS Pit
Length: 6:09


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0:43 - This is supposed to be a straight major arpeggio, but I accidentally augmented one of the triads. There was nothing to be done about it, so I kept going.
0:47 - I knew I was about to stumble over the fingering for this phrase, so I paused to recover - and inserted an equal pause at 0:49. That turned into two different pauses, but the trick is to make the music sound natural, and I don't think it was that bad.
0:57-1:03 - You can hear me testing the pedal, figuring out how much to use for this section. I decided on "none", which is why the sound gets crispier at 1:02.
1:58 - That abrupt pause is actually Mozart's.
2:04 - This is one of my favorite runs, and I screwed it up. Generally, if I make more than one mistake in a homogenous section, I just slow it all way down so that the mistakes feel like foreshadowings of a dramatic ritardando. Kind of dorky, I know; you can judge the effectiveness of the strategy during this run.
2:12 - A diminished arpeggio across three-quarters of the piano. I should have slowed it down; it's really awesome when you can hear the diminished triads.
2:29 - I didn't mean to speed up as much here, and it ended up making me stop and slow down at 2:36.
2:46 was a pretty bold alteration, even for me - I actually played wrong notes on purpose, because it was the only way to work with the mistake I had already made. Mozart, wherever you are: I apologize, a little.
2:50 - This is how I wanted to play the first run, too.
2:59 - Excuse my soft expletive; I couldn't decide which of the two chromatic-scale fingerings to use, and so I screwed it up.
3:29 - At this point, I considered it a lost cause to keep playing the song with any pretention of going "as written", so I started screwing with it on purpose.
4:33 - I played the wrong thing completely, so I made something up until I could fit back into the song at 4:40.
4:48 - That's my phone's buzzing, not the quacking of some really deep-voiced duck.
5:15 - I hit a non-diatonic note, so I hit a few more to make up for it.
And the rest of the song I just embellished with some of my own style, which is very not-Mozart, but the way I see it, it's my show now, not Mozart's. There are scores of music teachers who disagree with me, and it's true, I probably wouldn't do this in front of them. But there are tons of pianists who play literally everything by the book, and the world is just fine without one more. Is that an excuse not to practice as hard? Of course. But I'm spending the same amount of time at the piano, and in a way, getting more done.

What do you think?