Interpreting the Ligeti Etudes: Musical markings and time indications
György Ligeti has given very precise timing indications for all the Etudes together with the musical markings. For example, the timing indication for Etude no.12 is 2.56 minutes and Etude no.14a is 1.41 minutes. After consideration, I have decided to follow the musical markings rather than the strict timing indications of these works.
On Liszt’s Piano Transcriptions of the Beethoven Symphonies
A piano will never possess the same powerful sound as an orchestra notwithstanding its immense resources. I remember at the Paris Conservatoire we had to make piano reduction of orchestral scores at sight. The professor would bring to class a symphony we did not know and ask the student to play it on the piano.…
Madeleine de Valmalete
I met Madeleine de Valmalete for the first time in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. I must have been five years old. I was then studying with Mithat Fenmen who had been a pupil of Nadia Boulanger and Alfred Cortot in Paris in the 1930s. Mr. Fenmen and Mme de Valmalete had been together at the…
Piano Teaching
Clavier Magazine / US (November 1999) by Idil Biret The best way to develop control over a piece is to start practicing very slowly, keeping fingers close to the keyboard. Be strict with time and tempo; play purposefully, entirely without pedal. Play all the way through this way, playing legato with the indicated or implied…
On Wilhelm Kempff
Article by Idil Biret I met Wilhelm Kempff for the first time when I was seven years old at a hotel in Paris. There was an upright piano in the lobby and I played there for him. It was a new experience and a wonderful feeling for me to meet such a great artist who…
The First Piano Concerto of Brahms and its origins in Schumann’s Introduction and Allegro op.134
A very special friendship had developed between Brahms and Clara and Robert Schumann from the September day in 1853 when the young man first visited them. He had made a deep impression on the couple as a composer and pianist. Schumann expressed his enthusiasm in an article titled “Neuen Bahnen” published in Die Neue Zeitschrift…
On Rachmaninov
by Idil Biret Preceding a new Millennium, the 20th century was a time of agitation, intolerance and extreme restlessness. In this environment the understanding and the purpose of art also changed. Music became, as with the other art forms, a field for very diversified experiments and it was seen necessary to produce a “new” sound.…