Many thanks for this, Ian; I can't scan anything, I'm afraid, as I don't have the requisite kit (otherwise I'd have included the passage concerned just as you have included that frokm the G flat Impromptu in your original posting here).

Best,

Alistair

Sorry for the over-generalisations concerning 'Russian schools' - I realise there are many. As far as the multiple appearances of that passage are concerned, I would keep the dynamic envelope of melody consistent each time, yes, but would vary the relationship with the other parts (different voicing, varying ways of desynchronising parts, etc.) use different types of rubato, pedalling, etc.

B minor Sonata!

Ian described the first movement, in the Scriabin thread, as "excessively beholden to an ossified notion of sonata form".

I've been thinking about this today, and in fact I was thinking about the same thing the other week when I caught a broadcast of it.

I do have problems with this movement, but am not sure that they are down to "an ossified notion of sonata form" - after all, in the B flat minor Sonata he proved himself well capable of escaping the confines of notions of what sonata "form" "ought" to do. And he was certainly not beholden to any ideas of following other rigid templates in the roughly contemporaneous works - the Berceuse, Barcarolle and Polonaise-Fantasie. And in many of the (supposedly) shorter works - mazurkas and nocturnes - he is amazingly fluid and fluent. I wonder if the difficulty with Op 58 i is the same that affects the Allegro de Concert and (?not so sure about this) the Cello Sonata - that the harmonic language is fundamentally less chromatic (in the same way that Meistersinger is less chromatic than Tristan - I'm not forgetting the dense moments in the development), that there are quite long passages where there is a greater emphasis on the vertical-harmonic than the contrapuntal, less consistent exploitation of the piano as an instrument/ timbre, and a different type of motivic/ thematic transformation (think of the opening gesture of the sonata and how it becomes the left hand figuration accompanying the "second subject", and compare it to the way that the central section of the Barcarolle emerges out of that exploratory rh line). I guess the point I'm making is that it isn't so much the notion of what sonata form should be that causes Chopin difficulties, but that the joints from mood to mood, phase to phase, are a little more arthritic here because he starts without that quality of movement in the initial musical idea that, in almost all his other works, sets the music on an unstoppable trajectory. (And that applies to nocturnes just as much as etudes.) The fluidity we find in the small forms - structural elisions juxtaposed with clear demarcations - is absent here; the elisions are forced, and the articulation points feel like failures to elide rather than structural landmarks, breathing points.

I wonder if we are saying the same thing, but interpreting the problem in a different way, or seeing the cause as something different? One could say that Op 61 is a success because the shape of the piece is sui generis, in other words Chopin wasn't trying to force material into a particular mould; I prefer to think that it is the difficulty in controlling, organising and integrating the various types of material that poses the problem in Op 58 i.

Generally speaking - I find it fascinating to discuss these problem pieces - clear consensus that there IS a problem, far less straightforward to decide what the cause of the problem is!

A computer game starring Chopin!

Although this information is not important in one's understanding of Chopin' music it is interesting to know what modern medicine thinks about his medical condition.