3. Playing the ornaments.
Now for some fun! Students either freeze when they see these lovely little decorative notes, or they play them as if they were the most important notes on the page. It can be quite a task getting them to play evenly and gracefully and yet still keep the beat. Make sure the feeling of 4/4 meter is firmly established before teaching the trills.
If one chooses to execute the m. 4 trill and its termination with five notes (starting the trill on the written note), count 1 2 3 4 5 on the preceding quarter note with RH only. Notice that this same trill at m. 8 has eighth notes in the accompaniment. Here, you may choose to break the trill into a (3+2) or (2+3) combination so that each eighth note in the LH aligns with a note in the RH.
For the turn in m. 12, play A-G-F# as a sixteenth-triplet on the 2nd half of beat 1 while counting 1 a-a-an 2 an 3 an 4 an.
The trill at m. 109 is best played as six notes, starting with the note above the notated trill note. If the student counts 1 2 3 4 5 6 on beats 3 and 4, the LH fits right in with two counts per eighth note. (You could start the entire measure counting 6 per quarter beat).
All grace-note appoggiaturas, such as those at m. 36, are played on the beat. Even m. 42 should be played as an accented appoggiatura with two even eighth notes. (Ed. note: Performance practice for this era would also suggest the possibility of the notes being played unevenly: the first note as two-thirds of a triplet, the last note the remaining third.)
4. The Rests.
Rests should have the same length, speed, and intensity as notes, and yet there tend to be many neglected silences in students' playing of this movement. By changing how students count aloud, they can become more sensitive to the dramatic impact of rests. At m. 120, the student can alternate between speaking the counts that have notes and whispering the counts that have rests:
1 an 2 an 3 an 4 an
After this, then have them back up and add the previous triplet
measure. The rests and the fermata in the final two measures of
the movement need to be projected to give this movement closure.
I ask students to count the end as shown below:
1 a la 2 a la 3 a la 4 a la
1 a la 2 a la 3 a la 4 a la hold the rest, AMEN!!
JANET HICKEY maintains an independent studio and is a member of the piano faculty of North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. She has soloed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as with the Fox River Valley and Rockford, Illinois Symphony Orchestras. Janet has conducted master classes, and is active as a clinician. She holds a bachelors degree in piano pedagogy and performance from Alverno College, and two masters degrees from Northern Illinois University in piano performance and voice performance. Her major teachers have included Donald Walker, Dmitri Paperno, and Menachem Pressler.
