Hi!

About time I made some new recordings and...gosh! I have forgotten the hard work involved . And my absence from the piano has not made it better. I had really problems with the first where hands are wide apart, long arpeggios with left hand and there are some ugly spots and that's the reason I didn't put it up on the site right away (also bad tempo changes).
I am way much more confident with the second, which is a re-recording as I didn't like how the old recording sounded.

Also, I seem to have got rid of most of the noise. Isn't that so Monica?

And about the music. Wilhelm Peterson-Berger is one of the most famous composers in Sweden, but not abroad and he had some valuable output in piano music. Some is good as this set of eight pieces in op.16 while I can honestly say that I don't like some things he made. My plan is to complete this cycle and it may very well take some time as I feel so behind in technique, memorizing and score reading.

Comments?

Hi Robert,
I don't know these pieces, but it's nice that you want to record music by one of your country's composers.

The first piece - there are a few 'smudges' and maybe you can play some the repeated parts with some kind of slight variation. Your dynamics came off well, though. I like the second piece better and you do sound more self-assured. Also, yes, your sound is much better now. There is not as much hiss. The sound of the piano is a little different to me - is it your grand?

Glad to hear this music here, hope you complete it. There are some undervalued pieces there.

For 16:1 you have a good and stable beginning, but I think it should probably go quite a lot faster. After all it says "Allegro con fuoco". But I sympathize, those large arpeggios are not so easy. It is almost a LH etude and you might apply the usual boring technique to practice in small bursts of speed. Pay attention to arm movement, to get speed you probably need a fluid motion, which is contrary to the reflex when playing it slow when you try to jump the hand to position it for parts of chords.

For 16:2 on the other hand I think you could take it slower and use much more rubato and tempo changes to bring out the poetry. It says "Andante" and "dolce cantando", you play it more like a march. It might help to go a bit softer on the LH. You seem to have this piece very well in hand technically, so you can be free to experiment with expression! Exaggerate wildly (when no one hears!) to find ideas you like.

EDIT: I checked your profile and see you have a good recording of Chopin 10:1 - you probably need no advice on how to handle arpeggios!

I am pretty sure few people outside the Nordics know anything about Peterson-Berger so I don't expect that you have ever heard it.

There are quite some flaws so consider this as a first take (though I made 8 takes on this today) and I will continue to work on it to get it better.

About the piano sound...different than previous recordings? Actually, I put it very close this time, recording level on 11 on my Edirol and still it clipped at least once.

Second it much easier than first which I honestly totally underestimated.

And yes, another Swede . Anyone who played the piano seriously in Sweden must have played 16:2 right?

16:1. You are right about the tempo and it was much more difficult than I first understood. There is no way I can read the score at the same time as playing if I go faster so I probably need to learn it completely by heart and after than, practise another month to get it to concert standard. Still, I am not sure I can pull it off at the speed intended without spoiling it.
I think I have found a good fingering for left hand but I probably need to get it into muscle memory to really get it fluid as "arpeggiated chords" and as you say, the arm movement it important to not need to jump to the right positions. More practise!

16:2. You are right again. Listening back to it, you are right saying that it sounds like a march. I think I may have spoiled it for myself as I have more or less known this piece by heart in more than 25 years...and I probably played it better when I was 13 than now :s.

Thanks for your comments and I will try to complete it. I have only played 16:2 before so everything else is knew and I have no recording of them so I do not know how they may sound. From browsing through the rest of the scores, it seems like 16:1 might be the toughest but I am not sure.

Good quality recordings considering you were so out of practice ! And more confident playing than I remember from some of your previous recordings. I agree that no.1 would benefit from a more lively tempo, it sounds a bit indecisive at this pace. At the end of the first quiet section, the transition from una corda back to tre corde sound rather jarring. I'm not convinced the una corda is a good idea here anyway, but that is very personal.
Sounds like there may be some awkward RH chords in this piece, and occasionally there seem to be little inaccuracies here. Nothing to really worry about though.
I also agree with Joachim that 16.2 could perhaps be a bit more lyrical and less march-like.

So you see how it is on the forum these days. You submit recordings that are almost perfect technically, and then we start picking on the interpretation

Thanks Chris! I never quit completely and always stepped up to the piano a couple of times every week to play something I remembered by heart. I still know (more or less) a couple of Chopin's nocturnes, as well as this 16:2 along with some Scarlatti, Bach's inventions and can play ok. But I slowly faded to worse and worse all the time. Comparing with 8 years ago when I played 3 hours per day, I really suck these days .

I'll work on these a bit more before they go up. Felt like a good stop on the way to post them here for comments.

Quite ambitious work the first one. Wonder from where he got his inspiration on the left hand rolls...Liszt? And I am indecisive several times and even improvise on some rolls and chords, playing something that is close to the original and as you do not have the score anyway....

Give me some months and I hope that I can produce pretty decent recordings again.

I'm sure you will, and they will be much better than before !

Thanks for your encouraging words!