Hello,

Please can anyone tell me anything about the Beethoven Sonata in F minor WoO 47 No.2 ? The first movement is set for Grade 6 and I would like to find out if it is available to buy complete and, if so, have any of you played it or got it on CD?

Thankyou

Recording available here

Sheet music is in the current grade 6 book here

Enjoy!

Sue

Thanks for that Sue. I'll order the CD when I'm a bit more awake.

I do already have the grade 6 book but wanted to know what the rest of the sonata's like.

According to my friend Robodoc, the three sonatas without Opus number are included in the new Associated Board edition of the Beethoven sonatas. (I am afraid I do not know which volume they are in)

You will find all 35 Sonatas in these three volumes. A bit pricey (50 pounds for the three, but well worth it!!)

http://www.abrsmpublishing.com/publications/5639

If you have a local music shop, or have a browse at Foyles site (http://www.foyles.co.uk/) you can buy them singly. I ring my local music shop and they order sheet music for me.

Have fun!

There you are! Thank you for the reference: Tom - The WoO's are in Vol 1

Interestingly the link given above describes the sonatas as being grades 5, 6, 7, 8, Dip ABRSM and LRSM but don't mention FRSM, even though no less than 7 are set for that exam and this is an ABRSM website!

Perhaps because the sonatas themselves are playable by someone who is Dip/LR standard although they are set for FR...Like how I would grade a few pieces as grade 8..because they are on the grade 8 syllabus...yet also on the LRSM syllabus

[quote name='Robodoc' date='Jan 4 2008, 05:54 PM' post='651515']
[quote name='Mad Tom' post='651239' date='Jan 4 2008, 09:52 AM']
Interestingly the link given above describes the sonatas as being grades 5, 6, 7, 8, Dip ABRSM and LRSM but don't mention FRSM, even though no less than 7 are set for that exam and this is an ABRSM website!
[/quote]

That makes me feel better, I picked up a book of Beethoven piano sonatas in a second hand book shop and I really struggled to make a vaguely musical sound sight-reading my way through them, at the same time I also picked up some Mozart ones, some of which I could sight-read reasonably well.

It is probably just that you are more familiar with a Mozartean style. Like every other composer Beethoven has his basket of tricks and standard techniques (they are one of the things that make up his "style" - it is a myth that everything in Beethoven is motivic development). Things like broken octaves, certain note patterns in passage work, use of pedal points, cascades of arpeggios, leaps of an octave, a tenth, a twelfth, sustained trills, characteristic rhythmic patterns, characteristics shapes of melody and intervals, various forms of sound texture, favourite chord sequences for transposing between keys etc. Once you have learned a couple of Beethoven sonatas (and the first couple might be a struggle) the others start to look a lot easier, and it becomes possible to struggle through them at sight. And play them reasonably well with practice.

Even if entire sonatas are beyond you for the time being the great thing is that the Beethoven sonatas are great for just browsing. You can dip into the books and learn a theme here, a passage there, a slow movement somewhere else. After a few years you will know lots of bits, and you will have improved as a pianist, and can start to put together some complete movements and whole sonatas!


Beethoven's piano work is often ranked as difficult, uncompromising, virtuoso material, but the truth is that in the grand scheme of keyboard music (and apart from the last movement of the Hammerklavier) most of it is not especially difficult. At least not to hit the right notes, in the right sequence, at roughly the right tempo. Like all music you need a higher level of skill than that and a lot of understanding to give a worthwhile performance.

Maybe Beethoven's was the most difficult stuff that had been written at the time, but things have moved on and the works of many later composers are much harder to play - and not just the late 20th Century stuff like Messaien and Boulez (which I don't understand). Schumann wrote a lot of harder-to play music, as did Brahms (check out his two sets of Paganini variations). A lot of Chopin's and Liszt's compositions (like their etudes) are an order of magnitude more difficult than anything in Beethoven's sonatas. Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin (at least the Toccatta) and his Gaspard de la Nuit and Debussy's Etudes are for superior virtuosos only. Rachmaninoff's piano concertos are in a different league of difficulty to Beethoven's (In fact Beethoven's No. 3 in Cmin Op 37 is easier to play than many of Beethoven's sonatas). Those fast octave in Tchaikovsky No. 1 look a bit tricky too! And then there is Prokofiev.


Sometimes though, I think there is an unconscious conspiracy of professional performers, musical journalists, teachers, to persuade us that lots of music in the standard piano repertoire is extremely difficult (to play). So it is no wonder that we end up believing it and approach the playing so so much of the repertoire with insufficient confidence and self belief.


But a lot of the time it just ain't true. For example, another piece with a fearsome reputation is Bach's Goldberg variations. Why? There is hardly a variation that is more technically demanding than some of his two-part inventions. (You don't have to make things hard for yourself by copying Glenn Gould's way of playing them any more than you have to play the 13th two-part invention at the speed he did!) It is all alot easier than some Bach's four-part fugues. It is just that there are 30 variations, so it takes time to master, and stamina to play.

WOW Mad Tom, it takes time and stamina to read your post, but well worth it. I'm very inspired now and can't wait for my copy to arrive!

To some extent you're right there. I find things like Bach and Buxtehude much easier than Brahms and Liszt. Its more to do with the rhythms and jumpy-aboutness[1] of more modern stuff.


[1] Technical term that.