I have started learning Scarlatti K29 from the Editio Musica Budapest Urtext edition. This has a lot of hand crossing where I end up in a pianistic straitjacket at extreme ends of the piano. I presumed that Scarlatti did this for some sort of technical study as well as showing off. However, I have seen several other editions of this Sonata and the hand crossing has been mostly removed by swapping the hands around.

I include the Urtext and non-Urtext below. Does anyone have any thoughts on which way would be better to play this? Given the fast tempo, I am wondering if I should keep persevering with the straitjacket method, or go for what seems like an easier option as seen in the second image below. From a stingy point of view, the Urtext edition cost ???s so I'm not keen on buying another copy of it. Part of me also quite likes the challenge of showing off but it is giving me a bit of an arm ache!

Well, I know which one I would play myself! Bar 5 in the Urtext is like some bizarre form of pianist yoga. The non-urtext just seems sensibly pragmatic, though I do take your point about which one would look more impressive. Maybe.

My teacher said do it the complicated way - it's more fun.

It is total piano gymnastics - seeing as I don't do any other form of exercise, I may as well give this a go!

Oh - am just going to email you now about something unrelated.

In my opinion music is about sound, not sight, so to me it never matters which one "looks" more impressive, it's always about which "sounds" more impressive, i.e. which one are you most comfortable about playing? Why make things harder than they aready are? Maybe I'm lazy but if there is an easier way of achieving the same (or perhaps even better) result then I would prefer to choose that. So you can guess which one I would play.

I shall try out the easier way and see what feels best. However, if Scarlatti's original intention was to write it for showiness, then I feel I would be doing him a disservice playing it the easier way

Edit: Original post deleted. Needs more thought.

I prefer the Urtext, but am having trouble explaining why.

Personally I would split the hands differently than either of these scores trying, so far as possible, to keep the running semiquavers in one hand, and the "tune" in the other, so as to more easily give each of them a unique character.

Thanks VH2, I hadn't thought of it that way!

I've got the Schirmer edition of this which is written like your first version. I've just had a go and I physically cannot manage the stretch in bar 5! My version is very precise about which notes are to played by the right hand and which by the left, but if I was going to learn it it would have be the "easier" edition for at least part of it. Good luck with it.

I think my long monkey arms will come in handy for the stretches. I find the bits where the hands are a third apart really tricky, I hate having my hands too close together!

Sometimes there are advantages to playing something the "harder" way in terms of voicing, etc. but here I don't think that's the case...

there maybe other advantages to doing it the hard way though...
I'm reading a book by Charles Rosen at the moment called "Piano Notes - the hidden world of the pianist".

In the first chapter he talks about how the physical effort of playing is linked to the expression and the sound. He particularly talks about the effect of doing it the difficult way. He talks specifically about the leap at the opening of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata and how some are tempted to play it with two hands rather than one, as written. He writes:

"played as the composer wrote it, it both sounds and looks like a grand and daring leap, and the sense of courage and excitement is communicated aurally and visually. Played with two hands it looks easy, and is easy - and consequentially it sounds easy too."

I'm not a good enough pianist to decide whether I agree or not, but interesting point of view.

Charles Rosen is very knowledgable, and a far better pianist than I shall ever be, but amongst his revelatory insights he peddles a fair bit of nonsense too ... and this is some of it.

His argument is logical, and probably applies to many situations. The trouble is that he has not chosen very good examples. The leap of the LH in the opening of the Hammerklavier is not "dangerous" (that is to say, likely to land on the wrong notes) to anyone that is a good enough pianist to actually play the Hammerklavier.

His other example, of "safe v. "dangerous" fingering in Mozart's sonata K576 is similarly flawed. Neither of the fingerings" he proposes is dangerous to the advanced pianist.

I would always play the second way, provided you can make it sound like the composer intended.
There are many examples of pieces I play when I take some notes with the other hand from what was intended, eg in Chopin Nocturnes with a rising arpeggio left hand, I often take some top LH notes with RH thumb where appropriate. This Scarlatti is just another example

It may "sound easier" but I would guess that the effect is primarily psychological. I highly doubt (though it would be interesting to be proven wrong!) that one could tell whether a pianist was playing the leap with two hands or one from a recording alone.... sort of like the recent study which showed that professional violinists in general can't actually tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a well-made modern violin

Shades of Stork and Butter

That is interesting.

Has anyone repeated the experiment with pianos? (Yamaha Grand v. Steinway or Fazioli)

I don't really agree with Charles Rosen's comment. After all, if you are just listening to it played on CD, is it really possible to tell how it is played? And how do we actually know that we are making the sound that composer intended? There are so many recordings and they are all different. We do not have an actually recording of Beethoven playing it.

And is this even what we should be aiming for?

There is often more in a work than the composer consciously put there, and a great interpreter can do things with a composition that are better than the composer ever imagined. In fact by the time a pianist has memorized a major work, and worked out a convincing interpretation, and made it secure, they could easily have spent more time with the piece and know it better than the composer.

If the "ideal" interpretation were that of the composer, everyone would interpret things in the same way